Bits RSS

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 McDonalds (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 (bilboard-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 = ((μ_effμ₀N²h) / 2π) * ln(b/a), where μ_eff 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 (x_total), find the average length of all existing pictures (x_avg = (x₁ + ... + x_p) / p) and then use that x_total must be optimally equal to (or bigger) than n*x_avg + (n+1)*k. Form here, if not mistaken, n = (x_total - k) / (x_avg + 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
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Morning and afternoon travel speeds on key corridors in Brisbane, Australia (05.2015 - 10.2018) bit.ly/2AuLFE9. Could it be that using the "Inner City Bypass" corridor either eastbound (Hale St/Milton Rd to KSD/Cooksley St) or westbound (KSD/Cooksley St to Hale St/Milton Rd) is especially beneficial in the afternoon hours? Yet, even so, we see that the speed on it has steadily and slightly decreased during this period. 16m/s is ≈58km/h.
Noticed several websites with the same problem lately—drawing partial content and then quickly replacing it anew. Could be more noticeable on slower machines.
FIDE ratings of the top 100 players as of today bit.ly/2AsKuF4
Crime in Washington D.C. (2008-2018) bit.ly/2TPPe0n (Source: dc.gov, DCGISopendata, "Crime incidents in year x"). The word "theft" has been mentioned a total of 277933 times. Hard to imagine.
Total visits and total media stock of the libraries in Düsseldorf, Germany (2012-2017) bit.ly/2TPYXnC. I thought that the number of media items can only grow over time, but this diagram proves me wrong.
If you could write a script that traverses the offers on Airbnb, you would know where the cheapest rooms can be found, potentially allowing you to visit interesting new places. Looking manually within a sea of choice is simply not feasible. This is not particularly interesting to me, but you may find it relevant, depending on your lifestyle. If the transport is the issue, Ryanair or Flixbus might be helpful to you. That the latter was available in my country became new to me yesterday. Saw bus offers to Amsterdam, Utrecht and some other cities priced at five euro. Never been there, but since I look in the meaning of everything, these places are unlikely to attract me anytime soon.
There was a good saying, which I forgot. It said something like: Acknowledge someone's behavior publicly, criticize them privately. And I fully agree with that. The other day someone criticized a migrant publicly, ending with "in that case they won't receive my sympathy". I doubt that they need it.
If you found no easy way to answer any of the questions here, you might have missed the contact form on this site.
When I see a PDF version of a metro schedule (195kB), I ask myself why the size hasn't been stripped down to (less than) 10kB in the form of a simple HTML/CSS page. So many schedules remain accessible only through a search form which hides most of the information behind interfaces. Can we access much more content with much less interface?
If I were to travel, where would you like to see me and why? Can you imagine a way in which I could be helpful there?
Libraries and address points in Anaheim, California bit.ly/2AnYOik (Source: gis.anaheim.net, "Address points" bit.ly/2Ar67FV and "Libraries", bit.ly/2TMdqkj). Each library is drawn as a polygon, and the areas hint that the "East Anaheim" branch must be one of the biggest. May have to investigate the geometric architecture of the Euclidean branch.
Trying to imagine what could go wrong during the operations of a warehouse worker attempting wishful service bit.ly/2Aomvaa
Most online platforms are probably using this day intensively to gather data, apply machine learning, learn the preferences of buyers, their purchase intentions and a compilation of future product recommendations. Unfortunate only that by using the biggest systems, we often help the big get bigger.
It's Cyber Monday once again? (How many times?) Who knows, perhaps December hides even more surprises, smiles and joy. Sometimes it is better to be patient rather than impulsive and wait a bit more. Perhaps door number 23 would have it. Sometimes the extreme focus on a single event in a single month seems slightly unfair towards the other eleven...
Few things can occupy one's mind more than seeing former migrants being verbal against having more people arrive at their place of interest. (Some likely of their own nationality.) Believing to be something more than the rest and acting as if one obtained new rights to give justice (also to the people you previously lived with) seems so much out of tune, so sneaky. Really hope to see more people "of rang" lose their face in the future.
A paper is not the right place to test your grammar and spelling. Can easily tolerate few mistakes, but not a text in which few sentences are clear. Especially when the claim is that the law of conservation of energy doesn't hold.
Some components making the cost of a website: research, planning, design, development, maintenance, communication time, cost of materials, cost of staying up-to-date, cost of overtime & burnout, cost of leave, cost of eye care, taxes, pension fund contribution and so on. Noone ever claimed that building websites/software was cheap.
"Work on challenging problems" Have to be good sources of liquidity. Otherwise it's better to leave them to the young and those willing to prove something. Charging first, challenging second.
If being a digital nomad works for you, this is fine. Before saying you lived off a suitcase for an entire year, explain how much you lost by stuffing it with everything imaginable. The other day an article mentioned that the unwillingness to travel was due to "internal self-doubt in one's own abilities". Nothing is further from the truth. If I had to list reasons not to travel, only some of them would include: waste of time, floating without goals, meeting random people, working on projects with questionable value/outcome, preference for working within "alive" communities (in convenient, but not important projects), inability to rely on people's presence the next day (possible lack of acaccountability), stable cost likely exceeding the uncertain income, much stress for nothing, energy loss. The moment one knows precisely what they want, being in constant move will only postpone the moment of getting there. Still surprised that many of you don't understand that traveling can't sustainably improve your situation or make your life more meaningful. It doesn't matter how many people you meet, work with or lie as long as your skills and abilities remain constant. You can travel for life, but that won't build it.
Payments and gifts say a lot about appreciation and even more so in the right moments. Whenever someone hesitates about the lowest possible rate, it becomes obvious that they won't be able to enjoy your highest quality work/most expensive services. In that case, it's better to look for clients elsewhere.
A job that enables a living while disabling life is not one I'd feel proud to be in. Life is too short to waste it this way. Being aware how you feel will tell you whether it is time to quit your job or not. The sooner you find out whether it is the right one for you, the better. You have a career to build. Assume that many of the best existing jobs are already taken.
Noise levels (dB(A)) at different locations in Dublin, Ireland (18.11.2018 - 22.11.2018) bit.ly/2TL8BYn. The patterns repeat five times corresponding to the five days. Ballyfermot Civic Centre had an "unusual" spike at 19th Novermber (can you think of a reason?). Ballymun library was louder on three days. Sean Moore Road had consistently high noise levels most of the time, especially when compared with the other locations. A detail we notice is that unusual noise levels affected mostly the highs of the signals.
Simple excercise: Take a pen and paper and list the names of all variables you could think of (x, y, z, width, height, length, angle, inner/outer radius, velocity, power, time, solar irradiance, magnetic flux, luminous flux and so on). (You could also look at the International System of Units for more ideas.) In doing so, you will prepare yourself for better understanding of some of the common building blocks found within many programs. In addition, you may be able to visibly find possible/hidden relationships among them (combinatory play), leading you to to potential insights or optimizations in your work. You could also think of decomposition hierarchies—the smallest mini-variables through which you can describe a given variable (drawing tree branches may help). Programming/modelling is about operating with these variables by seeking the common nature among them. Which is why being familiar with this nature is quite important.
I suspect that how tired one feels at a given age is a function of the personal decisions involving their cumulative energy investments up to that point. Yesterday a person complained that it takes them 3 hours to reach their "dream job" (and almost as much to come back home). Keeping this lifestyle for a while (assuming to have no options) is like being unwilling to face the truth that stamina isn't infinite. We age by our decisions first. Is there anything you can do to preserve more of your energy while still doing the work that is important to you?
Age is rarely the limitation. It's what you tell yourself about it that is limiting you. Employers that discard you based on age may perish on it before you do. Listening to the conventional wisdom doesn't help much either. It will try to teach and condition you how things are supposed to be. Accepting other people's thoughts/experiences as a template of truth about your destiny is nothing else than a binding misconception.
"Multiplicative levers" seems a good phrase to consider in a variety of contexts.
When there are thousands of apps in the app store, each additional one is unlikely to change much. Perhaps it won't be noticed even when needed. Eating the world, but cannibalizing itself. A lesson of how what we allow gets back to us.
Have you identified any needless items or gaps in the process graph of how your company department is working? Where should all the arrows lead to?
Cogito ergo sum([i for i in range(10)]). Meaning: we often can't think without describing/implementing with mathematical functions.
Whenever something got spoiled in the refrigerator, it was often due to using the shelves like a stack. When new food arrived, it pushed the existing one behind into invisibility where it was easily forgotten and could stay forever. Infrequent poppers like me rarely notice the things accumulating at the back of the shelf.
"There are 400000 vectors and each one has 500 dimensions." Well, it could be worse than that. Having to handle this on a single core.
The NIPS 2018 pre-proceedings seem to be already available bit.ly/2ApKEgG. Plenty of material, once again.
Road incidents in Nuremberg, Germany (2001-2016) bit.ly/2AhCMO2 (Source: Stadt Nürnberg, bit.ly/2AjGarB)
Comparing two modes of travel from source to destination with National Rail, UK bit.ly/2AiSI2C and with Deutsche Bahn, Germany bit.ly/2THobEj
Air quality in some areas in Barcelona (October 2018) bit.ly/2TGl6og (Source: Open Data BCN, General Direction of Environmental Quality and Climate Change of Catalonia, "Air quality of the city of Barcelona", bit.ly/2THro6Q)
Historical street sweeper scheduled routes in San Francisco bit.ly/2AhPVqq (Source: DataSF, bit.ly/2TGnkE4)
Clusters of historically interesting buildings in Leicester, UK bit.ly/2Aemaqq
Locations and visits of the library branches in Newcastle upon Tyne (04.2008 - 08.2018) bit.ly/2AfJLHi (Source: Newcastle City Council, bit.ly/2TEfxXl). For nearly nine years, the "City" branch has lost almost half of the visits. Notice that some branches are missing in the left diagram.
Address points in the Niagara Region, Canada bit.ly/2TFfnPj
Libraries in Wexford, Ireland bit.ly/2AflcKB
Suppose you knew what particular sequences of ACGT mean. Could you then write a program that given an input of a genetic sequence produces output in natural language? Like this step happened first, which was followed by this process, ending at this moment (producing a readable story of many such sentences). Will the program be able to infer without supervision its operating context and the meanings specific for it? Can the meaning of previous sentences be "forgotten" with further developments in time?
You might think that including ten diagrams in your paper every time you could have included one instead says how hard you worked on your problem. The reality is that you are dilluting your message, letting each atom speak less by failing the test "Does this weigh ten tons here?" Not a problem related only to papers, but to almost any online material as well. Design thinking can help you polish your work by deciding what can be left or omitted. Once finished, reread your material multiple times to identify any problems in the overall structure/composition. Does C truly follow from B and B from A (without any hidden assumptions)?
Big brands can't afford to hire programmers cheaply as they also have a lot to lose in case of a bad user experience. One broken system during an important online shopping event or during the holidays and their name is at stake. The news can spread quickly in various circles/networks.
Finished reading the "State of the energy market (2018 report)" by Ofgem and two diagrams in particular made impression on me bit.ly/2TDkuji. Additionally, I was previously not aware of the extent to which Great Britain relied on nuclear energy and on gas imports from Norway. But disobedient brain, once again followed its own associations, asking: "Could it be that generating electricity on an island is slightly more expensive in general?"
Things can take either too long or crash badly. One of the biggest pains I suffered many years ago was while trying to render individual frames of a 3D animation (on a slow machine). While rotating the scene around, the software couldn't handle the limited resources well and decided to close itself on multiple occassions, causing complete loss of all newly made modifications. It neither asked me to save the current state, nor kept track of it to restore it on the next restart. I could barely keep my feelings. Since then I haven't touched any 3D software. But today, when I look at computer vision or deep learning, my old memories seem to be brought back in mind. Speed is critically important for efficient work.
Sometimes it's the lack of electricity that determines an hour or two of your day. Still preferable over the total hours lost on a slow laptop during the hours when it was available.
Was not aware that one could present clusters, hierarchies and labels within a circle bit.ly/2AbqUwQ. Also tried to arrange a sentence along a circle yesterday bit.ly/2Ap2bFN, but it doesn't even remotely look that beautiful.
Flower from four ovals bit.ly/2Af7W8Q. Inspired by a similar one, but having much more vivid colors. Another option is to create a single oval and rotate it five times by a multiple of 72 degrees, again using transparency and blending. Was named a Venn diagram at one place and I thought that this was perhaps the most beautiful one I've seen so far.
Certified farmer's markets in Santa Clara county bit.ly/2Tya18A, in case you are looking for some fresh food.
Sometimes I like to energize myself with shapes bit.ly/2Ag0BWj. By seeing the more balanced ones here, I tried to set the current within acceptable norms. But some scenes can be dangerous.
Median total arsenic and cadmium in the water at different locations in California bit.ly/2TwtWEZ (Source: data.ca.gov, California Department of Water Resources, "Water quality data", bit.ly/2TvXHpg). The data contains many other features, but I focused my limited attention and computational power on these two. The circle colors are determined relative to the maximum among all median values at all locations, which was 264mg/l for arsenic and 6.7mg/l for cadmium. This means that a red circle has a value close to the highest median (indicating higher concentration of the substance), yet not necessarily at a level that is dangerous for the consumer.
If you like the type of work you see here, consider accelerating it by structurung a good, well-compensated project where it could make a difference. Be ready to collaborate.
Relationship between road surface temperature and air temeperature in Seattle bit.ly/2Tvur21 (Source: data.seattle.gov, Department of Transportation, "Road weather information stations", bit.ly/2Aamp5U) The data came from a humongous 2.8GB file, which I had to reduce, then eliminate the very low and very high values, which were likely erroneous since neither the road surface nor the air could accept values for temperature in such range. Then eliminate the linearity created by the measurements where both values were equal (that's strange with double-digit accuracy). Still, as you can see, I do not pretend to have removed all possible erroneous values. But this shape became visible at the end. Made me wonder whether at lowest temperatures the air could be more often warmer than the road surface and whether at highest temperatures the opposite is true.
Looks like tweets at the Heathrow Airport were most intensive after people passed through the entrance and while they were at the waiting area (Source: "Geotemporal Twitter demographics")
Percent of people smoking cigarettes in households and percent of people bothered by noise in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2A9qhUO (Source: Bristol City Council, "Quality of life 2017-18 (ward)", bit.ly/2Tw48Zx). If you cannot imagine to which wards these points correspond, the following diagram might help bit.ly/2A9OIBy
Tree species with more than thousand exemplars in Bristol, UK (07.11.2018) bit.ly/2A98lts
Datashine UK Census 2011 bit.ly/2A8FNQE
Interesting that estimating footfall in retail stores is possible from WiFi signals of the nearby smartphones. In 2017, in UK were installed 789 sensors, 219 of which in London and 13 in Wales. Which of the two locations do you think registered higher median footfall in 2017? (Source: "Movements in cities: footfall and its spatio-temporal distribution") Be aware that the authors hint about some imperfections in their approach.
An opinion what it means to use scientific skills bit.ly/2TtJQjp. I found it slightly repetitive and incomplete, yet still a good reference.
"Separate the project failure event from assessments of the self; particular performances are not indicators of self-worth." Nice reminder. The future doesn't end today.
"I didn't get consumed by losses; I didn't get overwhlemed by successes" - Don Schula, former NFL coach
Good to pay attention whether scrolling "by any means" with the keyboard is possible on the website where you explain us about your latest JavaScript framework.
Creating a flower with quadratic curves bit.ly/2Tq8SQt. Good night.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci
Historical median speeds of cyclists by source-destination segment as seen in the City Bike system of Bergen, Norway (06.2018-11.2018) bit.ly/2A3pnZZ. Hopefully my intuition here is correct. I used the term "median speeds" to describe distances divided by median time durations used to pass through each segment (on all trips passing through it). The idea was to vary the segment color from blue to red to indicate slow to fast and observe potential speed differences in different regions. But the final diagram is characterized by very homogenous colors, indicating a quality of service with low variabilty. A pleasant surprise.
Some vegetarian restaurants in Stockholm, Sweden bit.ly/2Tsv3Fv
If someone comes to you, trying to rush you into a win-lose situation, happily show them the way. Being self-respectful requires working only with people who truly understand what it takes to achieve win-win and are willing to get there. No need to support another worker's grief at their workplace for purely selfish reasons. Time to recognize the impact that your buying decisions have on life and living conditions elsewhere. Question to ask yourself: "Is this helping the other side as much as it helps me? Are there artefacts of evidence?"
Value and price curves for some Deutsche Post letter formats bit.ly/2A3TD6W. It seems beneficial to stick to the standard format as much as possible.
Quantities of some minerals/ores extracted in India (2009-2015) bit.ly/2TpIkP5
Water temperature at the beaches in Chicago bit.ly/2A4oHnb. Please, note that there were differences in the number of observations made about each beach. This could make the median values slightly less meaningful. For instance, Ohio Street Beach had 11291 measurements, while Rainbow Beach had only 3298. One could also explore the median wave's amplitude and period. In this case, Ohio Street Beach and Montrose beach both had the highest median wave amplitudes (0.171), indicatng slightly higher waves compared to other beaches. Lowest median amplitude had 63rd Street Beach (0.128), indicating calmer water. Calumet Beach and Ohio Street Beach were the only two with median wave period of 3 (more waves arriving per unit time), while all other beaches had a value of 4.
Labeling along a path from bird's-eye view bit.ly/2A2gX4R. The idea was to make the labels appear as if in 3D (inspired by an image I saw). That the pavement seems to improve in quality at a distance is like an illusion. But persistence along the path... the only thing that matters.
Accessibility: When offering a digital edition of a magazine, ensure that it can be viewed a page at a time or that at least it has this option. By showing two pages at a time (left and right), you expect the reader to be in widescreen view and have a big monitor, potentially excluding users on small-screen devices, which will have to pan and zoom a lot (until they give up). If someone can only see a portion of what they read at a time, they may have difficulty relating the current to the previous material. "Design is not only how it looks, but how it works". Or how it reads. (Continue to offer the 2-in-1 view, but for print purposes only, not for screen reading.)
Strange. Kernel 4.19.0 seems to work well (tested writes twice), but 1 and 2 leave the journal in an inconsistent state every time upon sleep, making the disk read-only (so I have to run fsck manually, after restart, to fix the orphaned inodes after wakeup), which is very inconvenient. Likely to be fixed in the future, but also likely that I won't know when (if noone tells me).
Air quality: PM2.5 particulate matter at different locations near London (01.01.2017 - 30.10.2018) bit.ly/2A0JtE6 (Source: London Air)
A model used to gauge the danger of forest fire in Australia bit.ly/2A3XYqA. No guarantee of accuracy; comments and improvements are welcome.
Nested triangles in color bit.ly/2TidesZ
Playing with nearest neighbors and colored edges bit.ly/2zYaJD6. Very simple code.
Average wind speed vs. average rotor speed for the "La Haute Borne (2017-2020)" project by ENGIE France Renewable Energy bit.ly/2TgYnyJ. Could you come up with an easy-to-understand interpretation of this diagram?
Petrials of a cube bit.ly/2zZxB5h. "A Petrie polygon of a polyhedron P is a closed walk on the vertex and edge sets of P, where any two consecutive edges—but not three—belong t the same face."
Hexecontahedron bit.ly/2Th7TC0, almost looking as if someone slightly bent the leaves of several flowers and joined them on their outside contours
Capturing solar irradiance level with a smartphone camera also seems interestng, although I haven't seen a usable implementation in practice. Perhaps one day the entire smartphone display will serve as a solar cell to complement energy use from the grid in keeping the battery capacity level. Especially when not in use.
Do you think that capturing same-resolution photos at regular intervals (say every 30mins) with both the camera and the subject remaining static could allow you to observe relative differences in light intensity between two points in time, resulting in a homogenous color? Or will there be still differences at pixel level due to different illumination angles and possible reflections?
Annual electricity consumption in China (1978 - 2011) bit.ly/2ThX3eT. Fitting a cubic spline to the existing data gave me a function, whose output with the parameter "2018" is 8792.47*10⁹kWh. RMSE for [1978, 2011] comes at 1352.28.
That olives can suffer from bacteria too is new to me go.nature.com/2TgV4aH. Perhaps a great researcher reading this could help the region of Puglia (Italy) understand the disease before the spread of Xylella fastidiosa has a chance to affect the rest of the olive trees. (Wikipedia: There is an estimated 50 to 60 million olive trees in Puglia and the region accounts for 40% of Italy's olive oil production.) That the disease has started there did not surprise me much. For some reason I thought of "microclimate" once observing the geolocation, associating it with the redness of Florida (USA) (as the only place) in a heatmap about a natural event of another type.
Take something less known, slice it in half to observe (or imagine) its cross sectional area, connect the components in it with their names (placing the latter outside the area) through thin lines (zero crossings), make the components interactive on hover by revealing their functionality and you've got a great teaching material.
By the way, applying load on concrete with scientific methods allows observation how signals vary under increasing load and when cracks can be expected bit.ly/2zWFs3p. Possibly beneficial to see things in various contexts from the perspective of a signal (which is in itself some function).
Plotting across diagrams: showing plots next to each other and letting dashed curves pass globally through (many of) them to connect "important" details. Deeply impressed and thinking of more use cases. Perhaps I should have added it to the dictionary of techniques.
Applications for load balancing: balancing computation/storage across multiple machines; balancing the use of screen space at object level; balancing the number of variables and code clarity; preparation to balance RAM usage so that more clients can be served simultaneously; balancing transistor size and count on a chip; balancing the complexity of the solution with the complexity of the problem; balancing resource delivery (CDN); balancing visuals and words in articles/stories to make the content lightweight, clear and requiring minimal effort on the reader side; elimination of single points of failure in a system; balancing body weight over bicycle tires/car weight over car tires; balancing downward acceleration with frequent braking; balancing load on bridges through equally-spaced support columns/balancing load on dams/balancing column distances below cables in the air; balancing navigation among obstacles; balancing degrees of freedom and complexity for sufficient flexibility; balancing body movements and physical effort for long-term endurance; balancing CPU/hotel bed/parking utilization; balancing light illumination across the length of a street; ants balancing their weights and staying close together in structures to be able to float over water rather than be taken from it; balancing sound setup in a large room, so that sound does not reach people far from the scene too late; balancing the use of isolation in the building envelope; balancing the value of 3D printed objects with the cost of the material used to produce them; increasing satisfaction levels by having something for every taste; balancing the frequency of operations (batching); using simulations to understand dynamic behavior and prevent possible hazard occurrences; balancing work among teammates/manufacturing robots; balancing network flow, data capturing/retention frequencies, communication frequencies among people/devices/software components; balancing the risk of floods through stormholes; balancing usability vs. number of pins for a microcontroller; balancing decision-making through advantage/disadvantage inspection, balancing between speed and perfectionism; balancing resource/personal energy usage, energy usage in electronic circuits; balancing circuit functionality and expected battery drain time; balancing facility location, knowledge acquisition/exploration-exploitation, customer diversification, news sources diversification, portfolios/investments, risk/exposition to possible catastrophic events, risks/rewards, benefits/costs and many others I've missed here.
Forgetting to work with dummerAugust usually comes with the hidden consequences.
Exploring the relationships between wind speed-height, snow height-height and wind direction-wind speed at various stations in the mountains of Tirol, Austria (17:03 14.11.2018) bit.ly/2zQXeVF. This is only a snapshot as the data is dynamic. I also like the way Lawinenwarndienst Tirol periodically informs the audience of the possibility/existence of avalanches (heard of at least one person who lost its life because of them). Not aware whether a similar service exists elsewhere. A question that currently has me is whether avalanches are more frequent in summer, where the snow mass could loosen or in winter where it can accumulate. Perhaps wind could also be a factor for their appearance. Now back to the data. On the first diagram, we see that a couple of hours ago the winds were in general stronger at height above ≈2600m, although in some cases this was observed at lower heights as well. This is the "base" wind speed, not including the short-time gusts, which can be much faster. Notice how the points almost line up around the speed of 2.5km/h. At the second diagram we see another interesting relationship showing how snow height varied with the height in the mountain today. Lower heights had less snow, higher peaks—significantly more. At last, we look whether there is a connection between wind direction and wind speed. Here we see a more dense region of points, having low wind speeds of ≈2.5km/h where the wind direction is between 150 and 250 degrees, but we cannot say much about the fastest winds as they come from many different directions. It could be that at height there are less barriers to the wind, allowing it to become more flexible/chaotic in its direction (an assumption). Perhaps you could use this data source for more interesting insights in the future. Or explore whether the data archive can be valuable to you.
"That which is absent can be imagined" - Marcel Proust
Passenger traffic by terminal at the Los Angeles International Airport bit.ly/2T8vnJx. Unsurprisingly, Tom Bradley International Terminal is mostly used for international flights. For domestic flights, terminals 5 and 1 detected a lot of passenger traffic lately. (Source: data.lacity.org, "Los Angeles International Airport - Passenger traffic by terminal", bit.ly/2TajSkF)
A look at some of the parameters of the HVAC and PV subsystems in the NIST net-zero energy residential test facility project (first year only) bit.ly/2zOpOHh. The normal distributions are especially well-pronounced. Also looked whether there is a relationship between the outdoor and indoor power usage of the heat pump and whether the hour of the day has impact on insolation and inverter 1 output bit.ly/2zRsHaq. Most of the time, when the average power consumption of the outdoor unit reached slightly over 2kW, the one of the indoor unit was slightly over 10KW (not sure whether it can be said that this translates to an approximate coefficient of performance (COP) of 5). About insolation, I was surprised that one hour before midnight, the PV array was still able to capture sunlight, at least on some days. The strongest sunshine through the year was registered between 14-18h, yet inverter 1 reached its peaks between 13-19h, which likely suggests that there is still something to be gained by operating a combination of PV panels and inverters with even higher efficiency. According to a paper the building reached net zero in 2012 (producing 13523kWh and consuming 13039kWh). Additionally, it was surprising that the HVAC indoor unit was installed in the basement. Perhaps the idea was to let hot air rise through as many floors as possible.
Also grateful to the countless content producers whose work has touched/inspired me to try harder, delve deeper, seek better ways to improve. Without your effort I wouldn't be able to be the person I am today. I can only hope to be able to return this favor back to the extent I wished one day.
Thankful to all periodic visitors and readers. When I started, I had no idea that by rolling, this ball could accumulate so much additional mass. Part of this I own to you. Thank you for your attention!
Two recent examples I came across: minimize the maximum dissatisfaction (minimax) and maximize the minimum payoff (maximin). Confusing examples, but illustrative.
Crime in Boston (15.06.2015 - 11.11.2018) bit.ly/2zObBu3. Added a lot of background information, so it looks more like an infographic now.
A proper structure of your data can make your application faster; a suboptimal one will make it slower. If the data isn't in the format you want, ensure that you are applying the right transformations to it, touching only the parts you need.
Saw a reportage of a family with two children buying a large caravan that looked almost like a modern home on the inside. Found this interesting, because now they could move around and select where to stay as opposed to being bound to a single place. They parked in the forest and the barbecue and fresh air were in front of their door. I was concerned what kind of vehicle is needed to pull this large home and then saw the large jeep too. Possibly not the most fuel-efficient setup, but "genchi genbutsu" was not possible.
New books at the Vienna Public Library bit.ly/2zNO9ND (Source: Stadt Wien - data.wien.gv.at, bit.ly/2zLm0GY)
Learning about MAN busses bit.ly/2zOeT0c. According to the diagram, it seems that many bus models are not very well differentiated, offering very similar features. But the Lion's City Ü2, M, 12 and 18 series (last two of which are said to be new) have more distinct features relative to the rest. (Note: I added "2" at the end of some series appearing twice, which is how Ü2 was born too.) I wondered which series offered maximal seating capacity relative to the space available. These came out to be GL2, GL and G. Then I compared engine performance relative to engine capacity, where the series 12, 18 and L2 shined. Last, I looked which series had the smallest fuel tanks relative to overall volume. These came to be G, GL LE and GL LE2.
Mood prediction with various regressors bit.ly/2zLFiMj. Each has its own idea what would be at the end of the second month.
Labels for diagrams about precipitation: light, moderate, heavy, intense, severe, extreme. Good labels, good design.
Sometimes I wonder why timing diagrams do not more closely resemble this bit.ly/2zJuCO6. Having lines with equal slopes from left to right and back is perhaps fine from idealistic perspective, but realism tells us that not all connections and transfers between all nodes take the same amount of time. The variation in the line slopes serves as a reminder here.
Cannot easily confirm that the energy expenditure per keystroke is 2mJ, but if so, relating the total watt-hour value of what I could type in an hour to a body "still" value of 60Wh brings me to an unrealistically low ratio. This means that typing should not take much effort at all, but it feels different. Perhaps it is the thinking what to type that has the disproportional contribution. Keyboard still not found to be guilty. Shorter code once again looks more interesting, from a self-preservation perspective. (Having to move the cursor around a lot may not always be connected with high added value.)
C0₂ generated per unit of useful energy bit.ly/2T1URYZ
Enjoyed "Computational optimal transport" by Justin Solomon bit.ly/2zIjEbD. Very well-written, imaginative, interdisciplinary. Couldn't get enough of it.
"However hard they have trained, an athlete’s success hinges on their mental endurance" bbc.in/2T2U8Xp
Am I using the best tool to obtain the desired output? Perhaps there is another one, which enables doing the same in a fraction of the time. Sticking with the known just because it is convenient, beautiful or trendy is a sign of falling in love with the work. Being unaware, this can easily lead to time waste.
You can demonstrate proficiency in the use of ten different libraries and still create questionable results with the goal to impress rather than sell. Sometimes being a great programmer is not enough.
If I remember correctly, 58% of the people over 65 years interviewed in Melbourne, Australia said that they engage in sport. This is impressive, considering that at this age I cannot imagine to make even elementary movements without effort (if still alive). Which is why sometimes my clouded/overworked "monitor"-mind starts thinking it needs more of the same.
If you want to see my skills applied on your problem, feel free to propose your project according to the criteria specified on the contact page. As someone put it nicely: "You always have the right, but not the obligation to serve." Must be worth doing well.
Dot diagram of the correlations among the distances between some cities in India bit.ly/2T1FUGg. Didn't want to spend a lot of time looking for city coordinates, so these were the first I found on my drive.
My first violin plot is about the weekly footfall in Aviation House, London during 2016 and 2017 bit.ly/2SXrgA3
Sometimes I wonder whether the excitement that some content management systems were free wasn't too early. Over time the deviation between where the system was and where its users wanted to be, probably only grew. In such moments it becomes obvious why a free system will never be able to replace a paid designer/developer, adapting to the new requirements as they appear.
A minor user experience detail: Ensure that keywords like "waiting", "processing", "establishing" and so on, appearing at the bottom of the browser blink as rarely as possible. Visited a website that was like a blinking machine. Until now, I didn't realize that this was part of the experience too.
Performance of the memory hierarchy\non a sample system (as seen in Memtest) bit.ly/2T0cF71
A quad operational amplifier from Texas Instruments, whose design I liked for its simplicity and beauty bit.ly/2SKbEQh. Making the four outputs go towards the four edges of the component feels even intuitive to me. Small things that I like to see.
Some thoughts on pothole repair frequency bit.ly/2SOmogi
Electricity and natural gas usage in Arlington, Virginia (1995 - 2015) bit.ly/2SQgJGz. The x-axis could have used some better formatting, but no time.
Hibernated the machine yesterday night. Today—unbootable. Plenty of inodes in orphaned inode list. Have a broken key on my laptop (disabled "E" by too much typing), using a separate keyboard, so you can imagine how challenging it was to have the right signs appear in the command line. Good only that fsck could save my skin this time. Not sure whether this would be possible if it happens again. Fairly scared of the opportunity of being unable to work.
Statistic on invalid sensor readings bit.ly/2SONKmr
Easier to do art with normal distributions than previously thought bit.ly/2SPcX05
Degrees to radians in four lines bit.ly/2zxtPja
You don't realize it until you get exposed to it, but the browser's back button does not remember PDF document state, whereas with regular pages it frequently brings me to the last scrolled position. Looks like a question of consistency. Once you try to return to the document, but have to start again from page one, you understand that something was not right.
Ensure that I have no objections against your payment and you will increase your chance of working with me. Still, there are other factors that can change my opinion as seen on the contact page.
Attributes of the parks in Nashville, Tennessee bit.ly/2SKvR8t
Cumulative renewable electricity capacity in USA (2006 - 2016) bit.ly/2zrYxdH. Made this to get a better feeling for the growth rates. The wind capacity appears to be approximately linearly growing, while solar seems to be closer to exponential growth. The other renewable sources did not change in a very detectable way.
Daily reservoir water levels in London (01.01.1989 - 31.10.2018) bit.ly/2zwqS2i (Source: London Datastore, Thames Water, "London reservoir levels", bit.ly/2zuBNtm). The Lower Thames Group has lower lows, but higher median value as percent of the total capacity. My naive explanation is that either it is seeing more intensive use or it has lower absolute capacity than Lower Lee Group, making the spikes stronger after draining.
State of the reservoirs in New Mexico (01.05.2018) bit.ly/2zqE8FI. Elephant Butte Reservoir seems especially dry relative to the average historic level. NASA Earth Observatory also documented the case showing a bird's eye view with before-after comparison go.nasa.gov/2zry7Zz (interactive)
Average retail price of electricity in USA (01.2001 - 08.2018) bit.ly/2SILEVi. Interesting trend towards increasing the spread in the prices for residential and industrial use. Small industrials in residencies will be affected most.
Installed wind generation capacity bit.ly/2SJDpZ2. The data comes from a relatively new paper; cannot validate its accuracy.
At the end of 2016, the cost of graffiti in Southern Nevada was estimated to be $30 million/year. They even had to do cost-benefit analysis to estimate which of the signs are effective to remove. I liked how they quantified the benefit and cost in dollar terms for each case and looked for ratios (much) bigger than one. Don't know what a rat guard is, but they found it to be especially effective, with a ratio of 23.22. Using cameras was also said to be beneficial as well, but not so much for areas where only a low reduction in the amount of graffiti could be expected. Coatings were found to be effective only on small areas, for instance on valuable sculptures. What I liked is that they took photos of the graffiti and uploaded them to a system containing already made ones, looking for similarities in the handwriting style to discover who could have made it. Interesting application of computer vision here. What surprised me was that their software provider asked them to pay a dollar per database insert, which you can imagine can become costly if you have 60 thousand cases. (Source: "Cost and benefit evaluation of graffiti countermeasures on the Nevada highways") It is not hard to magine that other places may be similarly affected by vandalism of objects with cultural meaning. Object restoration can become expensive, necessitating a more proactive, preventive approach. Last, but not least, everyone of us carries the responsibility to preserve our cultural heritage and ensure that future generations will be able to experience it in its entire beauty as well.
A paper listed some fuels with their calorific values, which I converted into a diagram bit.ly/2zpdEV4. Can you confirm that such a big difference between hydrogen and the rest exists?
At the local store you may see 3 blankets made of different materials (silk, cashmere, wool) at apporximately the same price. Which one would you prefer? The softest one, the thickest one, the one with the best color or the one made of the material with the lowest thermal conductivity? Having no clue about the last, I would pass by.
Sometimes I get the impression that the line between math modelling and matmobiling is fairly thin. No doubt that the dynamics and traction are exciting, but there's still no need to end on the next turn.
Looked for more information about the shops at Atlanta International Airport. Many pages with content appeared, but there was no easy way to type a keyword and search. For some reason, the page number navigation at the bottom of the table disappeared once I clicked page two. Only the equivalent one at the top remained (above the column names), but it took me a while to figure out that I could still move around. Once I tried to click the small "3", but clicked "4" instead, it became clear that something was wrong with the homogenous link "12345678910" (spacing, please). Additionally, Chrome showed me an endless spinner on the tab, making me wait on a false impression that the content refuses to load, even though it has already appeared silently replacing the existing one, my eyes incapable of catching the trick. You would think that I knew exactly on which page I was, but this wasn't obvious to me. Confused.
In a report from April 2014 ("Energy efficiency and renewable energy potential study of New York State"), NYSERDA published a diagram showing rated power and discharge time for various technologies bit.ly/2zmBWPC. An interesting look.
Computing in parallel seems interesting because dividing work among many nodes effectively reduces the total computation time. A somewhat neglected aspect of it is that more nodes will also require proportionally more power. Amdahl's law has taught us that having n nodes does not make a system n times faster, yet now we see that (in case of no infrastructure optimization) this would require n times more power, assuming each node has the same configuration. In theory, this means that parallel computation would be linked with higher operational expediture (OpEx) and reduction in efficiency with increasing scale. Which is why datacenters usually optimize performance per watt. Whether we should be fast and wasteful or slow and efficient reminds us very much of the fairy tale starring the tortoise and the hare.
Comparing electricity usage (kWh) across several housing units on absolute terms can be misleading. Which is why kWh/m² has become the primary indicator of energy use. If I wanted to be even more accurate (and inspecting), I would be looking at kWh/m³, but the effort of measuring the dimensions of individual objects can get prohibitive. Sufficient to look at a laptop vs. washing machine to understand the motivation behind this. And also to remember that bigger objects can accomodate more components which usually scales the required energy as well. At some point, the volume used becomes a very real constraint for an occupant who carelessly acquires everything.
Comparing available seat miles per fuel gallon consumed and number of employees for Delta and Southwest airlines in 2017 bit.ly/2SFHRYX. Used their respective annual reports. Took some time to discover what was comparable (the formats were different).
"Bedroom CO₂ values of up to 4000ppm have been measured." Potential problem when several people sleep in the same small room (the count in some youth hostels can reach six). Frequently ventillate. An interesting unit of measurement here is "ach", which means "air changes per hour".
Uploaded an image, but then decided to remove it, suspecting it was inaccurate. It was about the average utility bills for various facilities in Fort Collins, Colorado. But by the time I uploaded it, bots have already accessed it several times even though I haven't linked to it anywhere and haven't written any proper description to it here yet. It would be bad to see it one day circulating somewhere. Couldn't easily diagnose where the problem was. First time seeing the average function return different results with the same data on each execution. If I can't trust my eyes/intuition, I remove it.
There are specific criteria that aim to guarantee that no condensation could build up in a place. Defined by ASHRAE, mentioned in a paper. The moving average of surface relative humidity must be 1) less than 100% in a 24-hour period, 2) less than 98% in a 7-day period and 3) less than 80% in a 30-day period. They even give the formula how to calculate it, but my knowledge is too limited to understand the difference between vapour pressure and saturation pressure, which is why I didn't implement it. But it's quite interesting to see how mathematical rules can stand behind the presence/absence of small drops on the inside of a window.
Came across this old diagram about "inability to keep home warm" bit.ly/2SFkHls. Will become relevant once again soon.
It's okay not to be able to afford a programmer as a company. Programming is expensive and if you fail to recognize it, you will have not much else choice than to carry the cost.
Other mini-ideas: riders in front experience the largest drag, riders in the last rows of a peloton have the lowest drag (down to 6% of individual rider, allowing 3.2-4.5x reduced equivalent speed), but cyclists in the middle have the strongest drag reductions (see "Aerodynamic drag in cycling pelotons"), spreading the weight among the wheels is beneficial, aerodynamics may outweigh the importance of power delivery at high speeds, the back of a teardrop helmet must touch the body, not point up. Exposing the helmet top against wind reduced speed.
Drag areas of various cyclist positions bit.ly/2SEAssQ. At the end of the paper, the authors mention that a combination of positions like "top tube 4" while no pedaling/steering is needed and "Back down 1" / "Back horizontal" while they are, could give optimal results. The question is how convenient is is to keep these positions and for how long.
Linear regression with no external library bit.ly/2zkzYiQ. A plotter still has to be used to demonstrate it.
Trees in Eindhoven, The Netherlands bit.ly/2SEq6ch
Utilization efficiency of the hotel bed base in some countries (2016) bit.ly/2SFeqpE. Malta manages to get the most nights per bed.
Normalized average CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement production per individual in various countries bit.ly/2zhYkcV. Used to believe that China pollutes the environment a lot. At least seen in absolute terms this seems to be the case and I don't deny it. We frequently hear news about the smogs there, about the need for gas masks, the heavy traffic congestion etc. But we may start asking ourselves whether there isn't a small percentage of the news used as actual propaganda to "make the opponent look worse". I've seen this in various publications and always asked myself how ethically correct this was. If we consider CO₂ pollution attributable to human activity, then it means that we can't neglect the number of people causing it. Yes, China pollutes a lot, but it also has a lot of people lives it needs to support. If we normalize the total pollution as reported by Destatis and the country populations as reported by Google, and divide these two values at country level, we start seeing approximately how much pollution is caused by an individual on average. By this metric bit.ly/2zhYkcV, China gets very close to an index value of one. A valuable perspective, since compared to this level, my own country isn't polluting much less than I thought, but only "negligibly less". And we also see that some of the critics of China are polluting more than it, yet their smaller populations practically make them almost undiscoverable. Germany's index value is 1.25 (negligibly lower than that of Finland). That the country has decided to speak more recently about its emissions cannot be a coincidence. On the one side, this sets a positive example for the rest of Europe, but on another, part of the damage has already been done. USA has an index value of 2.05, which is also less perfect that they would probably like to admit. Australia (2.28), Canada (2.47), Estonia (2.70) and UAE (3.20) also receive food for thought. Luxembourg (4.11) emitted 10.1 million tons of CO₂ with slightly over half a million people. The potential for improvement is everywhere—we cannot simply point as an excuse not to look deeply and ask questions.
Median equivalence income vs. poverty line in various countries (2016) bit.ly/2znwQmm. Here it is easy to observe how with decreasing incomes the cushion above the poverty line progressively disappears, making poor people most vulnerable. A diagram like this tells more than thousand words.
Country climates between 1996 and 2010 (avg. temperature (C), sunshine duration (h) and avg. precipitation (l/m²)) bit.ly/2zmn0AU (uses table A.1: Geography and climate). Interesting that Sweden appears somewhat separate. It could be due to the very short sunshine duration measured there. Thailand also separates itself from the rest, because during this period it had very high average temperature, lots of sunshine and precipitation (strange combination). Interesting too that many countries in Europe appear close together, but this does not mean that minor differences cannot exist (for instance, see the locations of Greece, Italy and Spain).
The 20 busiest container handling ports in Germany (2017) bit.ly/2zilgZn
In 2017, 33% of the brutto energy produced in Germany (≈654 billion kWh) was renewable. 16% came from wind and 6% from photovoltaics (according to Destatis).
Egg production in Germany, 2017 bit.ly/2zjtn8h. My idea of the true scale did not agree with reality.
Vegetable production efficiency in German states (2017) bit.ly/2SFy8Su. The type of vegetables grown can easily affect these numbers. For instance, yield from potatoes, sugar beets and corn had high numbers relative to other crops.
Bundestagswahl, 24.09.2017 bit.ly/2zl89GU (table 10.1.2)
Public theater visits by state, normalized by state population (Germany, 2015/16) bit.ly/2SwPBwe (tables 2.1.1 and 7.1.3). Looks like people in Hamburg were especially interested in stage play (Schauspiel) (363000 visits) and opera/dance (318000 visits). This leads to averages of 0.20 and 0.17 visits/person there.
Consumption of selected foods in Germany (2001-2016) bit.ly/2zh5Btj. The data is from tables 6.4.1 and 6.4.2. Wondered why eggs appeared before vegetables, but then found my mistake. I was comparing two different units—counts and kilograms. Once I assumed that an average sized egg is 50g, the count converted to 11.6kg, which is slightly more than the potato starch (10.7kg), but less than fish (14.1kg). Most consumed were vegetables (98.5kg), milk (83.9kg), fruits (65.7kg), wheat (65kg), potatoes (57.9kg), pork (50.1kg), citrus fruits (36.5kg), sugar (34kg), cheese (24.7kg), poultry (20.9kg). All weights are per person and year. Note: data between 2001 and 2014 was not available.
Average monthly income (brutto and netto) and expense composition of German households (2006-2016) bit.ly/2SAJ1VI. Please, notice that the time axis is not perfect. Uses the same document as the previous two, table 6.1.1. The first diagram shows a minor divergence between brutto and netto incomes. This suggests that higher brutto salaries do not necessarily translate into higher purchasing power. Investments, housing, food and transport expenses top the list, but the reason why education appears last here is less obvious.
Thresholds for risk of poverty in German states (2015-2016) bit.ly/2zhBdiD. For 2015 and 2016, the medians compute to 913 and 949.5€/month. Since more time has passed since then, it is to be expected that earning less than 1000€/month gives you sufficient motivation to rethink what you are doing and/or whether you need to change your employer/profession.
R&D investments by German state (2016) bit.ly/2zr8rML
Population in German cities (2016) bit.ly/2zhzx8V. Berlin, Hamburg, München, Köln and Frankfurt are probably more interesting to new businesses which look to scale fast.
A small collection of diagrams showing different aspects of the motor vehicle industry in Japan bit.ly/2Sz9vH5. Uses data from the publication "The motor industry of Japan, 2018" by the Japan Automobile Manufacturer's Association.
Dropped my pen on the sentence "New technology shouldn't reuse old problems."
"Runing an air conditioner consumes fuel without contributing to motion. Friction in engine pistons wastes fuel as does tire pressure and extra luggage. Only around 14% of passenger car fuel is converted into useful energy." Almost in line with the other frightening graphic I saw today bit.ly/2SwyCtZ. Dreaming about clients that would pay in full for my service if it were that efficient.
Low income, high unemployment bit.ly/2zfQXCV (Source: "The dynamics of opportunity in America")
Next step: animal and plant-specific watches
Has someone measured their heart rate (via smart watch), then consumed chocolate and after a while measured it again? Is there a spike and if so by how much? Does it depend on the quantity consumed? You could probably write a whole post about similar experiments. #quantified_self
"All men seek one goal: success or happiness. The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal—a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your goals: wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end." - Aristotle
Likelihood of outcome and corresponding label bit.ly/2zed2Sl
Not sure whether automated vehicles support automated parking yet. Or whether people in a wheelchair have an automated way to enter inside (any stand-ups and sit-downs can be painful). Or what happens upon unavailable/erroneous sensor reading when the vehicle relies on it to adjust behavior. Or whether data collection (where one has been and for how long) is automated too.
If you haven't seen a "wind rose", there are some nice examples on Google Images. I like how broadly they capture directions and how brightly they lighten up in response to intensity.
If you could see the world through an abstract painting, how would it look like? Among all the objects, would there be a place for a strange figure? If so, is there anything specific it was doing?
Utilizing a 128-core machine with terabyte of RAM for doing things of questionable value is a gargle with the effort of the engineers who invested a lifetime into squeezing the last quant of performance possible. The 128x better decisions will have to wait.
Similarly, payment is not an event that gives a programmer the right to leave behind anything, "koste es was es wolle".
Lack of consistency is very easy to spot. Just look at a chaotic diagram of the pipiline networks, their paths and the colors indicating what is transported. Or a chaotic coastal area with several types of wind turbines set up by different providers (perhaps under colliding interests), a pipeline, partially revealing itself over water, an oil extraction platform and wave energy installation, perhaps a solar installation somewhere on the ground. Feels like everyone did things their own way, with their own components, wiring, approaches, methods and waste products. And it shows. As if a kid threw its toys all over the place. Wouldn't be surprised if self-interest and escape from responsibility were the primary reasons behind global warming. Maximum production and profits with minimum interest in pollution prevention and cleanup.
"Robots building robots" makes me think of a one-hour overhead compared to one of 18 years. Is this reason for concern?
"Overachieving can result in high costs." Doing more than required is a waste in general. But putting the equal sign between waste and overachievement goes too far. One might ask "So you overachieved?"
"Quality and innovation can also mean solving simple things with simple means." Fully agree. To the extent possible, I have also tried to follow this philosophy here as well.
Annual energy production from wave energy conversion bit.ly/2z8U53e. Also liked the map of the wave energy potential worldwide, shown to be higher closer to the poles.
Bits and pieces almost led me to believe that we could use pyrolysis to convert plastic junk into charcoal for enrichment of depleted soil (no clue about process efficiency or potential of further carbonization). Never heard of or supposed that Dogger Bank could be a good place for an artificial atoll to harvest tidal power that would be close to six countries. That lithium and hydrogen can be generated by solar energy; that mile-weak car batteries are still suitable for home use; that deserts can provide 20 times the world's demand of energy; that Carnot's law limits the efficiency of solar power towers (receiving focused sunlight from many directions) to 76% (compared to slightly over 20% for solar panels today).
Someone said that a simple way to reduce car emissions as a driver is to regularly validate that no gasoline periodically drips on the street. I've seen this so many times (one bus made a mini-lake in no time) that I almost feel guilty for having no clue about the effect earlier. Greatly underestimated it. Sharing this here as a way to increase awareness about detecting and fixing leaks early as a way to contribute to a less polluted environment.
Found an interesting resource on biofuels, where they cite the results of different studies and the g-CO₂eq/MJ emissions for different cultures from which biofuels are made. As a baseline, the authors say that gasoline emissions are 81.7g-CO₂eq/MJ. Taking the averages of all available studies, sugarcane ethanol came at 20.78g-CO₂eq/MJ, while cellulosic bioethanol came at 22.41g-CO₂eq/MJ. Fairly surprised that these emissions are almost 25% of the baseline. Perhaps something to think about, at least temporarily, before electricity becomes the new fuel.
Wondering how these plots are called and where else they find application bit.ly/2zhaTW3
Earthquakes with magnitude > 4.5 in the last 30 days (labeled if magnitude > 6.3) bit.ly/2z9POwi. Assuming that "33km south-west of Mouzaki" is sufficiently close to Zakynthos, Greece. Uses data from the USGS real-time data service.
Average all-day, one-way travel speed for selected routes around Adelaide (1998-2014) bit.ly/2z8xiEQ. Taking in account all historic data about these roads, we see a minor reduction of the average travel speeds over time. This could be due to an increased number of available vehicles, lack of investment in road infrastructure or something else. More recent data is not available.
Residential property price index in various Australian regions (09.2016-06.2018) bit.ly/2z6hQJe. Not aware where Hobart is, but the prices have grown strongest there.
Cities in Poland bit.ly/2Sp5Aw6. High concentration around Katowice, although nearby Kraków is much bigger. Interesting line passing through Szczecin and Warsaw.
Sample use of the Poisson distribution to determine probability to have certain number of visitors at a store bit.ly/2z4KFpq
Distance matrix for some cities in Spain bit.ly/2SkOlwb. Vigo and Jerez de la Frontera seem to be far from many of the other big cities. Zaragoza seems to have a very beneficial location in terms of connectivity, yet Madrid has the smallest total distance to all of these cities.
Turns out that if many tree species are left untouched, they can be preserved for future generations bit.ly/2SjrlO1. Did not expect that their life expectancy could be that long.
The FAOSTAT data on value of agricultural production is quite informative. We can evaluate which countries have achieved excellence in the production of which crops. For instance, it was new to me that Azerbaijan produces lots of hazelnuts, Iran and Morocco are doing well with almonds, Viet Nam and Nigeria with shelled cashew nuts, Canada is great with lentils, Indonedia and Côte d'Ivoire with cocoa beans, India and Nigeria with okra, Belarus and Russia with oats, Turkey and Uzbekistan with apricots, Italy, France and Spain with grapes, USA and Brazil with soybeans and so on. Cannot possibly mention all producers here, although they deserve it since their poduction reaches and feeds so many. Truly global this dataset.
Greenhouse gas emissions by fossil type (2006) bit.ly/2z5xmVS. As you can see, greenhouse gas emissions span over many gases, not just CO₂. Ozone (O₃) is even missing here, but what I found interesting is that all these fuels are said to emit across the entire spectrum even when in different intensity.
"Over 80% moisture creates a favorable environment for plant pathogen attacks (bacteria and fungi), while humidity below 60% creates water stress and low photosynthesis rate." 20% does not seem like a very broad band; perhaps a device could help control humidity the way thermostats do this for temperature.
Libraries in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2z2fXgE
Turns out Columbus is between Indiana and Ohio, which explains my observat2ion yesterday.
Residential electricity prices by US state, 2017 bit.ly/2z7kXR4
Cycle time is important. If someone has to wait ten seconds to compile their code, perhaps they wouldn't be able to test too many changes. They could also forget what they were thinking by the time they have to type it. And if a click on the web doesn't feel instant, there is something standing in the way.
You could also choose a non-traditional form of support like taking care of travel/accomodation costs to see me work at an interesting problem with a team of people. More hesitant since this would be fleeting, the problem may not excite me, and it would be hard for you to extract much value from an introvert in a short time. This would feel more like an offer than a gift...
Having a birthday after two days (27.10, Scorpio). Since international ship and delivery times are known to take a while, you can start sending me your gifts today. The joke aside, I could use a new laptop (one, not ten) that will enable me to work much faster and on bigger problems while having to wait less on computation. Currently I fear to start many things, because I know how much time similar ones have taken me in the past (hopefully you liked them or used them at least once). This is not a comforting thought. I expect the new machine to be able to raise my productivity at least twice, discounting the fact that my main bottlenecks continue to be reading, creative thinking and speed of discovery of valuable problems to work on. (You could help with the last by becoming a client.) Notice that being faster will enable me to serve you much faster as well; remaining slower will make me less willing to discuss the details of many problems, since anyone with a better hardware will be able to serve you in a fraction of the time. If you feel that I am asking for too much, there are also alternatives like multimeter, microscope, electronic components, books, anything. Did I even mention that the shipping costs can be high? The last time I checked on Amazon, they were a third of the price... so contact only if interested.
Overall score and average daily traffic on the bridges in USA (2017) bit.ly/2yYLEHB. Uses data from the National Bridge Inventory (NBI). A total of 615002 locations were inspected with over hundred available features each. If you wished, you could also take a look at the build year of the bridges. Motivated by a report which claimed that ≈30% of all bridges (or a total of 180000) are steel-based and therefore subject to corrosion in case water is not drained properly and accumulates on the steel. (Steel coatings with zinc may offer some help.) Average annual cost due to corrosion of US bridges was estimated to be ≈8 billion dollar in 2012. That bridge maintenance can be critical is easy to recognize after the collapse in Genoa, Italy.
If producing a coin has been said to cost seven cents, having coins of one, two and five cents seems strange. Perhaps there is a catch behind this logic.
Motor vehicle accidents in Hartford, Connecticut (01.01.2005-13.10.2018) bit.ly/2yXO3m7. You can clearly see the streets with the most accidents and the monthly variation in accident numbers. There is a very weak tendency towards their reduction over time. In the first two months of 2011 alone, there were over 1400 accidents. The 90863 accidents were distributed over 5033 days, which is ≈18 accidents/day on average.
"Scientists insist on stopping coal usage until 2030" (Spiegel). Not surprising given that "coal-fired power plants produce the greatest amount of CO₂ per unit energy output, making coal the least efficient fossil fuel."
Learned about some minor differences between concrete and timber bit.ly/2S9ydNQ. You may know that concrete was linked with stronger greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; timber probably emits too, but to a smaller degree. The latter was also said to be draft-proven and efficient. While beneficial, sustainable construction with timber may come at the cost of waiting longer to obtain sufficient amount of material, especially for bigger projects. But the alternative is further depletion of our limited resources (in an irreversible process, increasing the entropy of the system called Earth).
Also saw the cams at Monterey Bay Aquarium, but everytime I tuned in to watch, the machine blocked and showed me a still image instead, mouse cursor disappearing. Possibly something small to fix on an otherwise great website. You may be able to see more.
At risk, at risk, (critically) endangered... bit.ly/2SeiCNg. What have we done to reach a state in which even the giraffe is at risk?
"Blindness or low vision affects approximately 1 in 28 Americans older than 40 years of age." Would be interesting to know the percentages for other nations and people older than 60, for instance. It made me (internally) happy that DeepMind directed their attention to this problem too, possibly realizing how much value hides behind finding new insights from raw data that could advance the treatment of eye diseases (like dry eyes or uveitis). Vision problems have the potential to decrease quality of life greatly, but also deprive people of the opportunity to learn from books and screens. Web designers could develop accessible websites for people with disabilities, but this is honoring the effect rather than fighting the cause. And by having to be constantly up-to-date with the latest, changing technologies, while working long hours for low pay, the designers and programmers themselves are increasingly exposed to such risks. Having more of them could lead to raising the need for better eye care.
Spent more than a second on a paper wondering why with increasing velocity of a train, the pressure on the wheels was increasing. Not obvious to someone like me.
"Since it is impossible to carry more information per unit time on high frequencies, microwaves are quite suitable for communications. Most satellite-transmitted information is carried on microwaves as are land-based long-distance transmissions." Having reason to believe that Steve Wozniak knows about this.
Finding the shortest route through an amusement park that considers the queue waiting time of the attractions may not be sufficient. This way one would preferably visit the ones with the smallest queues, which may not be the most interesting or memorable. Perhaps there was a reason why everyone was waiting elsewhere? Some interestingness measure has to be integrated in the computations to seek a more balanced quality of time spent. But such information is unlikely to be available on first visit.
Wind chill factors as matrix bit.ly/2S6LczS
StackOverflow following the "Join, cookie, join" practice bit.ly/2yWKVXl
Suspected, but never knew that the bottom part of the leg (below the knee) is made of two bones—tibia (thicker, on the inside) and fibula (thinner, on the outside). Not only that, but you can see that in terms of flexible movements, robots could improve a lot if they studied human skeletons bit.ly/2S7U20s. So many diverse joint types here. Thanks to Rice University for providing this amazing graphic.
When you see the double helix structure bit.ly/2yTnbn3, do you find that it could be "interactively animatable"?
Suppose you think of your body as a movable building, each room being a separate organ, having approximate idea how much energy they are consuming for proper functioning. Is the sum of all these values "weather-normalized"? Are bodies exposed to 5°C and 20°C equal in terms of how much heat they emit to the environment (and lose as energy)? If a value like 120W for sitting still reflects only what's happening inside, do we have to add to it the energy lost due to the outside environment (skin radiates in infrared)? If so, we may find that the skin surface area and the difference of external and internal temperatures, each raised to a fourth degree, can quickly double the original amount of energy, even in a warm environment of 22°C. Does this mean that the body, in a default still state, could be (less than) 50% efficient? And that by using warmer clothing—especially in the winter months,—we could partially decrease its energy needs?
Energy and oxygen consumption in some common human activities bit.ly/2ySsovw. The tabular data did not reveal well that a possible linear relationship between oxygen intake and energy used could exist—the more oxygen we breathe, the more energy we use. What surrised me too was the small difference between sitting at rest (120W) and standing relaxed (125W). On the opposite sides are sleeping (83W) and sprinting (2415W), which (at least here) hints about variation of up to 30 times.
Some time ago, I've read an article that discussed the issue of bacteria accumulating on car seats over time. It mentioned that the more often various people used the seats, the more bacteria they could accomodate. Now I see another study bit.ly/2yRsXWk, not considering seats this time, but still quite interesting. It makes one think about the areas most often touched. And that disinfectant use has to follow the rule that "microbial death of a population is logarithmic in time". This suggests that the substance will need more time than usual to fully unfold its cleaning effect. If you wish to compare observed with expected, you could also think of a microscope with a good "hello" magnification factor.
A quick look at the cultural spaces in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2yRQMgG. Not sure how current this list is, but there are many museums/galleries, community centers/halls and artist studios in it. Higher concentration of such spaces can be seen at the north of the city.
"Saguaro can soak up 750 liters of water in a single rain storm, enabling these cacti to survive the dry conditions of the Sonora desert in Mexico and the Southwestern United States." This could fill a water tank.
Public libraries in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2S4NjV4 ("Cambridge Public Library locations", bit.ly/2S2Wh4X)
Buildings with highest source EUIs and water intensities (gal/ft2) in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2ySGcG7 (Source: Cambridge Open Data, "2017 Cambridge building energy and water use disclosure data", bit.ly/2yOmOuc)
Polygons for 10000 buildings in Cambridge, MA bit.ly/2yPQ5of
Employment levels at some of the top employers in Cambridge, MA (1995-2017) bit.ly/2ySMqWy. Did not expect to see both Harvard University and MIT on the same diagram. Other employers include Mt. Auburn Hospital, Cambridge Innovation Center, Akamai Technologies, Hubspot, Google, Broad Institute, IBM Innovation Center.
"Eco-Totem" bicycle count at Broadway (near Kendall Square) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (24.06.2015-19.09.2018) bit.ly/2yNevie
Trees in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2EwssXV
Ratings from inspections of New York park features (as of 10.10.2018) bit.ly/2EzAyiy. Initially used log scale, but noticed that it didn't look great. Although, it highlighted which features had somewhat lower ratings, it also created the impression that much less positive observations have been made. In other words, it greatly reduced the difference between what appeared to be positive and what negative, which did not reflect well the nature of the original data. So I switched to sqrt scale, to try preserving the green bars higher, while keeping the red bars lower, but visible enough to be able to say something about them. As you can see, most park feature inspections were positive. There were almost no issues with dirt, facility equipment, fairways, walls, sand traps. Slightly more frequent were issues with litter, paved surfaces, weeds and trees.
US states by housing growth and average number of housing units per person (2010-2016) bit.ly/2EwRqGz. The result about New York looks strange, but according to Google, the city had a population of 8.615 million in 2016. If this is correct, New York was closest to having a housing unit for each person on average. Another question is how affordable these units were. What we also see is that California and Texas, for instance, were among the states with the smallest average number of available housing units per person despite having the highest absolute numbers of housing units.
The question is how many companies would pay a minimum of 70-120 thousand dollar/year (depending on the city) to cover the rents of people willing to relocate there. Perhaps not too many. Europe has the same problem too, where many companies/corporations have progressively become non-payers relative to the market. And they know it. All sufficient reasons not to relocate and let them do the work themselves.
Rent price reduction in eleven US cities bit.ly/2EvSsm5. Putting things in perspective shows that it's hard to speak about any "deals" here. Based on that data, the attempt to persuade readers that "now is the right time to rent" has no serious ground.
Libraries in Santa Clara, California bit.ly/2Es2tAK (Source: County of Santa Clara open data portal, "Libraries", bit.ly/2S1sgCL)
"Characteristics of electrical energy storage technologies compared by energy, rated power and discharge rate" bit.ly/2RUp8bA. Heard that Toyota Mirai would use a hydrogen fuel cell, but never knew why. Thankful to see such a diagram, potentially answering my question. What I also liked in this Arxiv paper was the mentioning of Georgetown, Texas as a city, whose energy supply has become 100% renewable bit.ly/2Ex1HCB
Libraries in Baton Rouge, Louisiana bit.ly/2EClIIa
Unrealistic vanishing points bit.ly/2RXodY8
An attempt to estimate the daily revenue of a cafeteria given some assumptions about the products on offer, the seating capacity and utilization and the average client stay time bit.ly/2EE9Bub
Company X "agreed to pay" amount Y... Nice wording. Punishment described as collective lunch at the table. Wondering how far punishers can go before receiving their own punishment.
Noticed that many flavors of "Lay's" chips have 160calories in 28g (or 571.42cal/100g). Almost as much as 100g sesame or 100g almond.
Think about it. You are pushing your thoughts to Facebook, your videos to Google and your code to Microsoft. How well can this potentially end for you? If you want a different kind of life, start being more conscious who you are supporting and how.
Bug reporting s.si.edu/2EswnoF ↗
Flower (6.8kB) bit.ly/2Es0aO9. Now is rest time.
Testing an idea about decreasing saturation at distance bit.ly/2RUQApy. Your variants will be more appealing.
Wondered about the average speed of a swimmer. In the case of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, the winner of the 1500m freestyle swimming for men (see BBC Sport bbc.in/2EohQKt) achieved an average speed of 6.09km/h. According to Wikipedia, this is slightly faster than a fast pedestrian (5.32 - 5.43km/h).
First time seeing typical luminances under various conditions bit.ly/2RTtVtY
Looked at the air pollution (PM2.5 and PM10, yearly averages) in German cities according to the World Health Organization (WHO), with data from 2016 bit.ly/2RPFkuI (Source: "Ambient (outdoor) air quality database, by country and city", bit.ly/2EltjdV). In both rankings Frankfurt appears first; Gelsenkirchen and Stuttgart are in both top tens. Berlin takes 5th place in PM2.5 and 16th place in PM10, with a consistent value of 23µg/m³. Motivated by an article mentioning that air pollution "can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year" bit.ly/2RR6OA7
Surprised that Wikipedia ranked Luxembourg second in per-capita cigarette consumption (2016). I believed that people with a high living standard stay away from smoking, but this table proved me wrong. If someone were to smoke the 6331 cigarettes per year, assuming Marlboro and market prices, this would amount to ≈1677.69€/year bit.ly/2RNCHtz. Feels almost cheap considering the average monthly salary in this country. This makes cigarettes highly accessible, likely promoting their consumption. But I could be wrong.
"This term does not depend on... and survives..." Survival of the fittest terms under best conditions. Have a great start in the new week!
Library branches in Los Angeles, California bit.ly/2ElEd3i (Source: Los Angeles Open Data, "Library branches", bit.ly/2Elkv7E)
Improving my old diagram of the street lights in Los Angeles bit.ly/2RMMqA5
Identified 250 of the most common words seen in Metallica's lyrics and underlined them according to their sense (positive or negative) bit.ly/2ROS5FW. Mostly reds, few greens in between. "Never" occurs almost twice as often as "hell", which is slightly more popular than "die" and "death". In fear that some "positives" here could be false ones.
Libraries in Queensland, Australia bit.ly/2RMrzgp. Even with good intentions, it is practically impossible to label all 328 libraries. Noticed that postcode 4875 can refer to many islands, partially explaining the variety of libraries there. Only two libraries in this list have postcode 4000 and Brisbane as locality. We notice that many seem to follow the coastline, but the farther one moves away from it, the harder it becomes to find such fireplaces of culture.
CH₄ emission factors for manure management for non-cattle in 2016 bit.ly/2Ej7JGN. Strange that these emissions seem to depend even on the weight of some animals, at least in this case.
Median rent by borough in London, UK (2011-2017) bit.ly/2EhL4e0. Kensington and Chelsea as well as Westminster seem to be the only two boroughs with higher median rents than the rate for the entire city. In Q3 2017, the median rent in Kensington and Chelsea reached almost 2800 £/month.
Trying to make sense of a freely available map on Visit Talinn (screenshot: bit.ly/2EllwN1, media bank: bit.ly/2EvTHSz). Each sightseeing has coordinates, photo and description. Saw a small reportage yesterday (and a nice palace with a big garden said to be close to a beach). Unlike other places, tourists there seem to have enough information to make good choices about spending their time.
"A map of every building in America" nyti.ms/2ROwptl ↗ has a link to the datasets from Microsoft. Also nice to read about some of the insights they captured from the data.
Libraries in Houston, Texas bit.ly/2ElSGMC. Due to hurricane Harvey, some branches have closed (temporarily) or were moved to new locations. Still great to see that the majority continue operating unaffected. For the most accurate and up-to-date information, visit the branch search page of the Houston Public Library bit.ly/2EhxVlf.
Always try to choose descriptive names for your variables and functions. Better to provide slightly more context than not enough. (A long variable is likely still shorter than a short sentence.) If you make other people think, there is a good chance that after some time noone will remember the meaning behind the letters. Even better is to use "search and replace" specifically to shape the meanings and form a helpful train of thought. Not understanding labels makes people reluctant to change them, reducing code dynamics and at the end, causing important functionality to be dropped.
Simple idea about finding the yearly water leakage cost from a known number of water drops per second bit.ly/2EgLlOk. Expected a much higher amount—could you identify a mistake? As they say: "Drop after drop a reservoir is formed."
Another figure from arcs bit.ly/2EjmLfQ
The (former) Opera logo with a grey border bit.ly/2RNX7me. May not be exact. Contours created by functions/code, shading in GIMP.
Was not aware that ellipses can approximate a square (rotated at 45deg) bit.ly/2Egki5B. Seems counterintuitive to me, although this is what an experiment revealed.
Removing the most and the least common colors in an image bit.ly/2RN8Zow
Functional decision making bit.ly/2EkjyfY also reminds me about the danger of taking sides. The words seemed to fit naturally there.
Parcels in Chattanooga, Tennessee bit.ly/2RJRchT (Source: Chattanooga Public Library, "Parcels", bit.ly/2RIawvU). Almost 80000 shapes in one diagram. The borders between parcels are grey, so if you see too much of it, the surronding parcels are likely too small to be visible here.
PCA on the characteristics of some airplanes seen at the Leipzig airport bit.ly/2RJXVZ2. Junkers Ju 52 and Boeing 767-300 look "different" compared with the other models.
Libraries in Dublin, Ireland bit.ly/2RIB7ZE (Source: Dublin City Council, bit.ly/2RKwYo3). Tried to make this interactive in reasonable time, but CSS didn't agree. My initial idea was to show the hours as bars for each day when someone moves over a library name. Despite losing some time this way, the idea led to another diagram bit.ly/2EhJKbb. Surprised that the opening hours on the website were in a strange format that made me think: 10-5, 1-8, 10-1, 2-5. What a relief to have the 24hour format nowadays...
Salad preparation processes bit.ly/2EcRkDG. For a smile and a proof of the value of process optimization.
Geometric view of escalator and elevator paths bit.ly/2EfG7CB
Percentage of wall area covered by windows bit.ly/2RGeJQN. Surprisingly small when we exclude the size of the frames. One might think it is reasonable to assume around 35%, but this is not the case. Some buildings already have all-glass sides.
"The current BioNano Genomics Irys System requires one week and 1000$ to produce the Rmap data for an average size eukaryote genome, whereas it required 100000$ and six months in 2009." - in "A succinct solution to Rmap alignment". Such a great improvement factor here.
Somehow reminds me of the "fastest return to center" taxi-driving "algorithm", according to which in the case of multiple orders, the driver starts to service them outside-in. The goal is to stay as long as possible at a place that would allow serving a maximal number of people (the single central parking spot in the city). Might explain why being far on the outside, I rarely see resting taxi drivers here. Even they learned the algorithms.
Always wondered what happens with all the bikes which people bring to the most desired places. Does someone care that they are brought back to their original stations to prevent future accessibility bottlenecks? Isn't this process painful? Finished reading a material mentioning "reallocating docks to the estimated improvement" (in the case of Citi Bike), which seems to be another valuable perspective to consider.
Squares smoking in color bit.ly/2EbKPRx. Good that the paper included the author names next to what I wanted to show. Eliminates one additional step for me.
"Which materials can help reduce carbon emissions?" bit.ly/2Eb4ZeF ↗. Comes almost parallel to what I found about the thinking of Buckminster Fuller today bit.ly/2RJlVLM (Source: Wikipedia). Strong, light, energy-efficient, easy-to-assemble housing and awareness about the finite resources we have (like fuel) were among his ideas. Had no idea that refrigerants could be improved to a big impact. And transport with the burning of fossil fuels remains a major contributor as well.
Travel time to work in Riverside, California (2006 - 2015) bit.ly/2EgGxIL (Source: County of Riverside, California, "Commute travel time", bit.ly/2EdyGfa). With the caveat that the margin of error about the number of estimated commuters was not considered. Strange that in 2015 many people traveled 30-34 mins, but much fewer traveled 35-39 mins. At least from this data, it is not easy to find a reasonable explanation why such big differences appear (in periods that are close together).
The Journal of Optimization has a well-optimized website.
Another valuable dataset are the historic journey times in Bristol bit.ly/2REhlyw. It contains travel time and estimated speeds at various locations and times between 12.01.2016 and 11.09.2016. Theoretically, this would allow us to look which areas within the city are more susceptible to traffic congestion. But it is not that simple. These are only point estimates and the travel times given make more sense for distances we know in advance (curve lengths, which are missing). The name of the road is insufficient in deriving this information. But we could use the estimated speeds to compute the medians for each location, if more than 15 estimates have been made. This way we derive the following graphic bit.ly/2RDDIEl. It doesn't seem to paint a uniform picture; at the cener of the point cloud we see points of widely varying median speeds. And at the periphery we have too few points to allow ourselves to be conclusive. Ideally, the addition of more places and measurements over a longer period could have helped to reduce some of the uncertainty (at the additional cost of installing and maintaining more sensors). But even so the work of Bristol City Council can serve as an example what other cities could do as well.
You can also see the streetlight locations in Bristol bit.ly/2RG2CDm. Unfortunately, there was no wattage information provided by Bristol City Council at the time I accessed the data. If you look more carefully, you might see thicker dots at what appears to be intersections. Not surprising, considering how many vehicles pass through such "hotspots" and the increased likelihood of incidents there.
Attempted to visualize the cycle network in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2Eds2pj. Not sure how accurate or complete this is. What I found interesting is that Google doesn't map strict boundaries around the city the way it does for other ones. Looking specifically for boundaries returns images with very diverse results. Which leads me to believe that the aspect ratio won't resemble the true reality.
Going for a walk as the weather is nice and once again you didn't pay.
Fire-related 911 calls in Seattle bit.ly/2EdC3CK (Source: City of Seattle Fire Department MIS, "Seattle real time fire 911 calls", bit.ly/2RHhlh4). The 758354 phone calls are for the entire data collection period, although due to a small datetime related error somewhere in the data, it was not easy to contain the events in a known time range with high certainty. Also note that not all locations have been included in this "visible" zone. Many individual calls were reported outside these boundaries. But the highest density of events was seen within them.
If budgets are often broken down to the smallest individual revenues/expenditures, could it be a good idea to represent this hierarchical nature via a hierarchy of objects, each containing smaller ones?
Rhombus of charges and an inseparable relationship bit.ly/2Eci2MZ. From an excerpt of the book on electricity and magnetism by Edward M. Purcell.
"Web developer in Dresden" Wondering why someone must be willing to be "chained" to a given location to satisfy employers who don't know how to keep their people. The world is big and job titles aren't location-bound. Unfortunately, the chaining approach is getting widespread with such ideas like "we will teach the medicine students, but we want them to stay and work in the country for at least five years". Proposals which can leave one speechless.
Something I have seen on no mobile device so far—showing the time remaining until the battery is fully charged. An endless animation may not be the most informative. What do these percentages mean? Will it charge from 30 to 70% in 30mins, from 70% to 90% in 60 mins and from 90 to 100% in 80mins?
Used the "Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages" by the Bureau of Labor Statistics bit.ly/2E8ZyNl (scroll to bottom) to try finding locations with very high average weekly wages for three chosen sectors in Q1 2018 bit.ly/2RCI0M4. I inspected the single file for this year, weighting 535.3MB, which took some time. A bug found its place in the code since many locations appear more confidential than one might like. But you can also get the data and find the missing pieces by yourself.
Cities in Netherlands and some connected components bit.ly/2RBQza3
A trash bag which tears apart after bin removal forces the user to clean the floor (or the street) as well. Not beautiful. Similar to a failing software which spills its effects unpredictably. Whether "cleaning up" software is a term-coincidence?
Frequency types and the difference between LiFi and WiFi bit.ly/2E8jEah. The diagram is based on another table from the same paper. Had to use the log scales for frequency and wavelength to visually see everything in context. Reflects my own understanding, which may be incorrect.
"Efficient tuning of online systems using Bayesian optimization" bit.ly/2E8W0L0 ↗. An article from Facebook research.
Bike availability considering available bikes relative to bike stand capacity and update time relative to last update time at various Villo bike stations in Brussels bit.ly/2RBhumo. Shows how color coding can reflect a combination of criteria and not just one. Red stations were closed. This is only a snapshot by the time the data was extracted. It will not reflect recent changes.
Trees in The Hague, Netherlands bit.ly/2RCJJAW
Using a juicer to prepare fresh drinks in the morning often leaves me feeling worse after that, not better. The reason can be described as efficiency below some critical threshold. If someone needs to stuff the machine with kilograms of produce just to get 50-100g of juice out of it, then something incredibly wrong is happening during the preparation process. "This juice is so healthy, you have to drink it!" Throwing away the essence of the products is pure waste; you can feel that on your pocket the next time you go looking for fresh fruits and vegetables. So I try to think of the body as an efficient machine, giving it the option to take only what it needs and throw the rest. If I consume the product as it is, apart from the juice, the body might be able to derive other useful fibers/microelements. If I throw the rests produced by the juicer, I gain nothing, being left only with a small amount of juice. So I woke up with the idea to find whether Energy Star has tested juicers or blenders and whether it has made some recommendations. Unfortunately, these machines were among the few not included in the tests online. At the end, the realization is near, that whatever we do first in the morning has to make us feel good about ourselves and our world. How we start the day matters far too much to allow it to be squeezed to nothing by some "greedy" technology.
100g Toblerone chocolate bit.ly/2E7fWhk would have 542.85 calories, which according to my diagram from two days ago (if we trust the numbers) must be equivalent to 100g poppy seed. Their saturated fats? 30% vs. 4.5% (according to Google).
Blue Bikes Boston has a nice API to check the current availability of bikes and docks at a large number of bike stations. Using this for point cloud visualization would be only one option; collecting data over a longer interval could allow more interesting uses or the creation of infographics. (Storing lots of data requires a good storage device.) Unfortunately, from my quick check, I could not JSON parse the status page (the station information page worked as expected), but you may be able to find a workaround.
On various occassions, between 13.12.2010 and 30.08.2018, Boston City Hall collected invoices that show a total electricity consumption of 105.565 million KWh and a corresponding cost of 18.276 million dollar, which makes an average of 17.31cent/KWh. The median is 11.08cent/KWh. (Source: data.boston.gov, Environment Department, "City of Boston Utility Data", bit.ly/2RwztKR)
Locations of the public libraries in Boston, Massachusetts bit.ly/2RAlUd5
A hardcover book with contents that have become soft only a year later may be worse than a soft cover book whose contents still remain hard. The environment may also have a preference.
Which stations in Switzerland had the most connections on 05.10.2018? bit.ly/2E4MCb7. From actual data (229.2MB) provided by Swiss Public Transport (opentransportdata.swiss). The railway stations in Bern and Luzern both had over 3500 connections in this single day.
Castles and palaces in Steiermark, Austria bit.ly/2RvRgBD (static) and bit.ly/2RzBRQY (dynamic)
Twelve of the most common tree species in Zürich, Switzerland bit.ly/2E27S1e (Source: Stadt Zürich Open data, "Baumkataster der Stadt Zürich", bit.ly/2E2l5XJ). Grey areas on the map refer to less common trees.
Electricity prices by sector in Austin, Texas (2006-2017) bit.ly/2E0Kf9g (Source: data.austintexas.gov, Austin Energy, "Austin energy rates - cents per kilowatt hour by customer class", bit.ly/2RAi97N)
Electricity generation from solar installations in Wyndham, South Australia (01.08.2018 - 06.10.2018) bit.ly/2RwQ80A
Number of breweries in USA (2012-2016) bit.ly/2Ry5zFW
Selected museums in Düsseldorf, Germany bit.ly/2RxWnkY
Locations of the library branches in Düsseldorf, their visits and number of loaned materials bit.ly/2RD8TzI. Took some time to complete. All sources as seen on the graphics. Remember that the broader access people have to materials, the more original demos they will be able to build too.
Bike counts at various places in Düsseldorf, Germany (2012-2017) bit.ly/2DZloCK (Source: Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, "Jahresübersicht der Dauerzählstellen Radverkehr seit 2012", bit.ly/2Ru0AWF). Taking the sum of all fifteen-minute interval measurements reveals that during that period "Mannesmann Ufer-Totem 01" saw 3.798 million passing bikes, "KÖ Steinstr." counted 3.057 million and "OKB Nord" saw 2.716 million bicycles. Other stations saw at least a million less than "OKB Nord". To understand approximately where these places are, you can see the following map bit.ly/2E2yEGJ.
Status of some charging stations for electric cars in Barcelona bit.ly/2E1LDZp
Good that at least some websites allow us to browse the content in our language of choice rather than in a language they want to impose on us due to some geographical location. Designs which limit the number of options to one and automatically enforce it have usability and accessibility issues from the start. This way, lack of common sense is quickly demonstrated at corporate level.
Winter is approaching and with it the need for ingesting slightly more calories than usual. Made a small diagram bit.ly/2yn9Umn with some foods and the amount of calories they are said to contain in 100g. As data sources I used Google and Nutritionix.
Indicate NBA games wins and losses with no graphics bit.ly/2Rsf8X3
Find letters in a word belonging to a given range bit.ly/2yih4Zf
Idea to determine the current used to display a given time on a digital clock bit.ly/2yiMXRD. Suggestions are welcome.
Imagined having three answers as intervals and attempted to visualize their intersection with the simple fill_between idea bit.ly/2yiDjOL. Does what I wanted, but only with closed intervals (no open intervals or infinities). Open intervals made me sad, especially when fill_between would expect functions for more rounded shapes.
Side question: Is there somewhere a good analysis of EEG/ECG signals on the web we could learn something useful from? Saw many .dat files bit.ly/2yfkhcb, but not sure how to handle an unknown encoding. My usual approach didn't work.
Always nice to see more density plots bit.ly/2RtbpbE, especially when thematized by color.
Parental care bit.ly/2RrSQVd. Code to highlight a small percentage of the hurdles parents go through in order to raise their children (and also to acknowledge their almost heroic effort).
Although beautiful, I have to admit that the way I see it, visualization can also work against us in some cases. It tries to present everything as it is and leaves less room for abstract/imaginative thinking. For instance, if I had a polygon and line, it would be very easy to plot both and spot whether the line is inside the polygon at any given time during an animation. An algorithm that doesn't rely on manual visual detection, however, has the opportunity to be more efficient than this by defining and enforcing the right rules rather than waiting to the end to determine the level of compliance. The ability to abstract, imagine and work with as many diverse variables (from various objects) as possible in our memory is essential in systems thinking, where visualization can sometimes interfere by showing only a temporary state or priming us to trust the superficial rather than delve more deeply. This effect makes me question when, how often and in which contexts visualization has its place.
Imagine what would be if every city had an easily/cheaply obtainable mini city plan and timetables/route plans for each public vehicle number. Not smartphone-only, but supporting hand processing. So hard to do.
Carefully crafting the content on your website has many positives. It enhances your site's relevance relative to the user interests/needs, it filters the important from the extraneous, clarifying and strenghtening your message, it improves the control over the resources which load and therefore the accessibility for your clients on the other side of the globe, it allows you to present what makes your company and its offers unique and finally, to structure a hard-to-resist call to action to find more customers. If you aren't sure what would be the best way to get your message across, you could ask a web designer you feel comfortable to work with. Also think about what other websites do to improve the quality, freshness and diversity of their content. And which of the already accepted practices have the potential to be harmful.
Have you seen the map of the stores in "The Dubai Mall"? bit.ly/2IBq0xv ↗. May take some time to load, but zooming, panning and tooltips work nicely. Do you think that photos/more information about the current offers in each store could have enhanced the experience?
If you are not careful, the label "Full path to directory and filename..." will start to look like one.
When you see "<ponder>" in a book having nothing to do with web design, do you start thinking how often you pondered about HTML elements?
There is an annoying bug in GIMP 2.8.22, but it is not easy to reproduce. Might have been fixed in the latest version, but I do not know since I cannot use this version with my distribution. Sometimes, after selecting the paint bucket (thinking that the current tool is the move tool) and pressing space to pan the view, plenty of new windows start popping up. This caught me on several occassions. Having to engage in manually closing 20-30 windows after a wrong action is quite inconvenient.
An attempt to determine the space between elements (in px) within a flexbox container having justify-content: space-between and a known number of child elements bit.ly/2QvTGiB
Fulfilling no wishes without sufficient payments. Not a magic lamp.
There is no place for ageism, not just in software development but in any branch of the economy. Still incomprehensible to me how someone could claim that "software engineers have an expiration date". I truly believe that if someone loves what they do, they sink in it fully and don't count days, months, sometimes even years. To them age doesn't matter much. It matters to someone who has no idea how to fill their days and who has enough time to count them. If we consider the circumstances under which some chess players have died, some of us would be surprised to learn that they were actively engaged at the chessboard until the moment of their last breath, determined by a stroke. Imagine that! I doubt they were thinking about their expiration dates; they were busy kicking ass instead. More than sure that programmers who love their profession and are passionate about it feel the same way too. Can burnout, conflicts, belittlement, setbacks, lack of resources, bugs, faults, browser inconsistensies or lack of promising ideas stop them? Highly doubtful. Similarly to the names of the great chess players, theirs will be remembered too, long after they are gone. Making history seems so much better than obsessing with uncertain predictions about the past.
The nomad list bit.ly/2xV2J5A ↗ seems an intriguing idea in itself, potentially useful to a lot of people looking to travel and work at new places. But I wonder how objective such ranking can be. Until one knows how these numbers were generated, the results probably shouldn't be taken lightly. Looking at the monthly costs (perhaps including rent in a coworking space) is sufficient to discourage beginners, since their expected salary may barely cover them. But people who earn >50$/hour may feel quite comfortable with the discomfort of traveling. Otherwise traveling is a waste of time if you don't know why you are doing it and what purpose you are fulfilling. Meeting people can easily turn into an expectation to meet people and now you have a problem. Now traveling frequently from one destination to another for new meetings will quickly destroy your productivity and leave you less employable in the future. Follow the advice of nomad sites and gurus on your own risk.
I could imagine CO alarms particularly useful at locations where employers cram too many programmers in a room and and ask them to code, rarely turning on an air conditioner or having no proper ventillation. Quite easy to exhale the wrong gas type, which others will then breathe in. "CO poisoning" has negatve consequences on creativity, they say. Which programmer can afford to lose their creativity over time? Wondering whether better air quality could be connected with the fact that many writers experienced their best ideas after walks in parks. Suddenly, CO alarm devices start to look interesting. If I felt concerned about my health while at work, the first thing I would do would be to discuss the issues, not simply silently accept them. The second thing would be to quit if the existence of these issues has been proven, but there is no interest in fixing them. Trading health for payments doesn't seem like a good business.
I prefer to see beautiful code with a slightly slower performance over fast code that is nowhere near beautiful.
The energysaver report reminded me about a useful way of thinking: just because something doesn't appear to be used doesn't mean it isn't. They give faucets as an example. If after washing we leave them on the "hot" side, it means that water is being pre-heated in the background even though we never use it. Does this seem like waste to you? Wouldn't easily come to this idea myself; relying on reports is therefore a good way to challenge my assumptions. That appliances also draw electricity even when turned off and left unused also seems to defend this theme. (And becoming paranoid enough to clean the time-proven, cumulative rests in the oven is perhaps best left for another time.)
A person decided to improve the windows in their home and mentioned the investment made and the expected savings per year for two window pane types. This enables one to look at payoff times of that investment bit.ly/2QnuzhG. This data is likely valid only within this specific environment, although it can still give us some hints. If old, wooden-frame, single-pane windows have to be replaced, the investment could pay off after acceptable 5 years, which may be considered meaningful. On the other side, if existing double-pane, clear-glass windows are replaced, it would take much longer (over 20 years) to see a net positive effect of that investment. This clearly illustrates how the same action can have different feasibility/relevance when evaluated from different perspectives.
Drinking is still a serious problem for a lot of people. I could never understand the reasons behind the social expectation about "meeting on a drink" and usually looked for reasons to apologize for not participating. I don't think that being able to "carry much" should be seen as a badge of honor even when some people try to present it this way. Decided to find some information on average per-person alcohol consumption in a day. 13.7g may not seem much, so I looked at a fictive person weighting 60kg and asked myself how long it would take them to drink the equivalent of their own weight. Naively assuming that alcohol fills the body like it would fill a can suggests that only in 12 years no organ would be left unaffected bit.ly/2QnDe3S. May scare someone.
Learned about the Small Wind Certification Council and its database. Unfortunately, can't do much data analysis with ten items.
Libraries in Ottawa, Canada bit.ly/2xRiSsE. Parsing the XML file revealed one branch called "Bookmobile", which was covering "Greenboro", so I removed that. Then I saw a more beautiful map bit.ly/2xTCyw4 ↗. Learned that Ottawa is located near the Ottawa River with most libraries being close to it, at the north-east part of the city. After the dent, they no longer follow the river. The branches "Alta Vista" and "Metcalfe" reminded me about a search engine and a law respectively, but perhaps you know better whether there is any historic connection.
Finding parks with facilities of interest in New York bit.ly/2xKeJH2. Uses information provided by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Due to the large amount of data, I have selected only four facilities (out of 41): WiFi hotspots, zoos/aquariums, ice skating rinks and paddleboat rentals. Usually the data will come from a database and won't appear mixed with the functionality. But my goal was to ensure that other people can run their own searches without expecting them to have experience with database management. If you wondered which park you have to visit to see one or more attractions, this might for you. Could this save some information-related calls to 311? Not sure. If you are looking for something else or have a specific project in mind, you can always make a proposal and we'll see whether working together could be possible to make it possible.
"Logic is to mathematics as evidence is to science." Beautiful relationship. So we need both?
When people want to quit your program and press "X" to avoid an "Upgrade" button and the process it could start at an unconvenient time, don't show them a new window with a big colorful button "Continue" and a small grey button "Cancel", when the default intention is to continue with the installation/upgrade. Someone who can't undersand English may never be able to close your application this way.
NYC fatalities by movement mode (2000-2017) bit.ly/2OZr1lm. From the same "Vision zero" report: "Increased darkness in fall and winter evenings is correlated with 40% increase in serious injury and fatal collisions involving pedestrians." From the action plan: "Dangerous driver choices are the primary cause or a contributing factor in 70% of pedestrian fatalities."
Attempted to create an infographic bit.ly/2OYtlcp about cycling in New York, integrating multiple diagrams and facts from the "Safer cycling" report, published in 2017.
Did not expect that the Mayor's management report for September 2018 on.nyc.gov/2OYLlUa would provide so much detail about how a big city like New York operates. Plenty of things to think about—many tables with data, diagrams, references. The work breakdown by agency allows one to learn what each agency does, which goals it has and which metrics it tracks. Learned about the BYTES of the BIG APPLE™ datasets, which were missing on many other open data lists. But also about police response times, library attendance (New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, Queens Public Library), the park cleanliness ratings, the decreasing number of consumer complaints (and the average days to close them), the electrification of the vehicle fleet (2.42x compared to 2017), the number of potholes repaired on local streets and highways, the overall traffic crashes and fatalities involving cyclists and motorists, the average number of adult families in shelters per day, the countless reasons behind the 311 calls (by number of occurrences) and much more.
"Scientists find over 60000 of new Maya structures (thanks to LIDAR)" bit.ly/2OYqXm4 ↗
Productivity vs. cost of work bit.ly/2xLU59w
An example how to find nearby hotels in Singapore bit.ly/2NatSpQ
Libraries in Singapore bit.ly/2xOoDYd (Source: "Libraries" by National Library Board, data.gov.sg, bit.ly/2xLSrEJ)
Interactive map of the wind turbines in Switzerland bit.ly/2xLt7i9 ↗. A click on "info" gives useful information about manufacturer name, operator name, turbine model, diameters and heights, rated capacity, produced electricity within the last couple of years. One can pair this information with the accompanying wind atlas bit.ly/2xLOQXs ↗ for greater insight. There are also maps of the many hydro power plants bit.ly/2NapG9M ↗ and the few nuclear power plants bit.ly/2xFtwmr ↗. Not sure how often these maps are updated, but this is a good example of identifying a single, common theme and developing it to serve multiple (potential) purposes.
Durations of traffic disturbances in Bern, Switzerland bit.ly/2xKsxkN (Source: opendata.swiss, "Traffic announcements BERNMOBIL", bit.ly/2N9Pra4). Approached this without any expectations, yet the diagram turned out to be interesting. There are blocks and diagonals, which I think might correspond to both long and short term planning. The median duration of the traffic disturbances comes at ≈1hour 19mins, which explains why there appear to be many single points.
Distribution of population ages by region in Helsinki, Finland (2016) bit.ly/2xMFOJA (Source: opendata.fi, "Helsinki alueittain", bit.ly/2xKZdLf). If my interpretation is correct, three regions have the highest concentration of people in the age group 25-39 years: "Kallion peruspiiri", "Alppiharjun peruspiiri" and "Vallilan peruspiiri".
Concentration of 33 pollen types in Luxembourg (1992-2018, log scale) bit.ly/2xLZMUT (Source: data.public.lu, "Pollen", bit.ly/2N7Jx9I). Looks periodic; when they were available, the types "Urtica", "Betula" and "Gramineae" appeared in the highest concentrations during this period.
Total cumulative photovoltaic capacity in Great Britain (2010-2018) bit.ly/2N6UNmz
Path through some sightseeings in Hamburg, Germany bit.ly/2xR4aSP. Found a list on hamburg.de and converted it to a diagram.
Each time you upload a video on YouTube, you are sponsoring Google twice—once by giving up on the rights of your content (allowing embeddings on third-party sites) and once by granting the right to attach advertisements to your video that can be shown on each visit, independent of the number of visitors. By having your own website, you make clear that these assets belong to you, that they are exclusive and accessible only according to your criteria. You can decide how much to charge for anything you create and how to display it in the best possible light. You also have full control over efficiency and priorities. No need to sponsor the ultra-rich by living a life of creation in misery. To regain your freedom, sometimes you have to quit all services that suck you. Which is what I did a long time ago.
If you can't explain clearly what you want, your project is not implementation-ready.
Idea: A click on a street (curve) can reveal information about all hotels (points) located on that street.
"Automobile assembly and engine production plants in Europe" (interactive map) bit.ly/2N6zUrR ↗. It has always been unclear to me which car manufacturers produce which parts where and how they fit together. Good to see a visualization trying to reduce this uncertainty. It saves a potential attempt to seek how to do one thing more. Update: Using this data, I tried to indicate the presence of some car manufacturers across Europe bit.ly/2NbmR8A. Please, understand that I couldn't include all of them (or all city labels) while preserving legibility; I had to focus only on few. Also be aware that some cities may have an "additive" color if more than one company is present there. This is the case with St. Petersburg in Russia, where Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen operate. Tesla is also already starting to appear (Tilburg, The Netherlands), but it is the only company among these ten having a single presence.
Didn't know that ATMs (Geldautomaten) were unevenly distributed across Germany bit.ly/2N5VCMo ↗. This means that some people living in smaller cities may not have an easy access to their bank accounts. I remember that during my time in Germany, ATMs were at every corner, but I heard that only more recently their number has been greatly reduced/optimized. Currently, this doesn't affect me much, since I am no longer there. It became more important to me to be treated with respect rather than simply be seen as a temporary number at a "modern" place with no rights whatsoever. No longer to be seen on German streets/corners; no longer to be seen as an exploitable material.
Some low payments and inadequate planning have led to the inheritance of big problems like careless engineering, holes on roads, falling bridges, cracks in walls and so on. Visible to everyone. Whether this seems logical? With software it's the same: what isn't payed for now, is inherited later. Fixes could take a lot of effort and resources, which can easily exceed the original amount which would have been dedicated to a better solution.
"Verfied and vetted by the community" could also be a dangerous phrase. This community could also consist primarily of beginners. Relying on random ideas that got upvoted and expecting them to lead to good practices asks for serious trouble. In some programming languages that trouble has already arrived.
Have you used a code quality tool so far? Did it attempt to actually decrease the quality of your code based on some assumptions? Did it slow down your machine significantly with its real-time "as-you-type" checks? One of the many reasons I try to stay away from heavy IDEs.
Discover Magazine: over 400 requests, over 7.5MB page weight, 50s load time (on this machine). Not to mention the periodic Ajax "metrics" requests after the end. Is there still anyone who wants to discover, while being tracked in real time? Time Magazine also takes itself time: 299 requests, 5.5MB, 58.18s. So easy to identify who has never looked to hire a good web designer.
Visual analysis of the "Heroes and Might and Magic 3" creature characteristics bit.ly/2zxjsNy (data source: bit.ly/2zwHfgB)
"Build a stronger brand by working with your biggest fans." Great advice. Enthusiastic fans can charge you.
Path planning with some sightseeings in Brussels bit.ly/2OTZC4i. As long as my coordinates were correct.
Quick overview: 311 service requests in St. Louis (2009-2014) bit.ly/2OScV5x
When you use the end resource (water), how often do you think about the system (pipe network), the potential inefficiencies (high percent leakage) and dependencies (electricity usage for water delivery and wastewater management)? For instance, in case of USA, this electricity is said to make ≈4% of the total usage. We often see the end product (output), while the complexity remains hidden from us (black box). But the efficiency of a function consisting of many invisible operations is still reflected in the end price.
Efficiency chart for different photovoltaic materials bit.ly/2OQsp9Z. Admittedly, a very engaging graphic by NREL.
Container cranes vs. annual TEU at top 25 container ports by TEU, 2015 bit.ly/2OMxMak. From the publicly accessible annual report 2016 of the Port Performance Freight Statistics Program bit.ly/2OMAIDL ↗. Seems that more cranes and higher total berth length are connected with higher TEUs. What I also liked were the port profiles at the end of this document and their design/structure. Update: Now used these features to look for port similarities bit.ly/2OSBK1d (but included only ports which deal with containers). For some reason, my machine believes that the characteristics and performance of the ports of Oakland and Savannah come close, although on a closer look we see that they have their own distinct advantages. But we can see that few other ports were like New Orleans, Houston or New York & New Jersey, for instance. The performance of the port of Long Beach showed at least some similarity to the one in Los Angeles. At least, when we consider the year 2015.
If the United States Courthouse in Los Angeles bit.ly/2zsEhKc ↗ is said to have 900 monocrystalline solar panels generating 507000kWh annually, according to my calculation this reduces to ≈64.3Wh per panel and hour on average, independent of the weather conditions.
Street lights in Baton Rouge bit.ly/2ONjZjC. A total of 42643 lights, more densely positioned at the west side of the city (near the Mississippi River, it seems).
Average truck speeds on select metropolitan area insterstates (2012-2015) bit.ly/2OJJD8T (Data source: bit.ly/2OHlobj)
Did you like the work you have seen so far? So much that you would recommend it to another person or not? Do you see gaps or have suggestions how to improve it? By the way, have a great start in the new week.
Olympic medals by age (1896-2016) bit.ly/2OID3Qc. Expected to see a difference or at least a shift between the various medal types, but there wasn't one in the data. Most medals were obtained when the athletes were 23 years old.
Bus trip prices per distance traveled bit.ly/2OLlmzr. The current prices were as seen in my old demo on IC busses, the driving distancess were obtained via distancecalculator.net, geocoordinates via latlong.net, plotting with matplotlib and image arrangement with GIMP.
Goal-exclamation bit.ly/2OKUXl6
Amplitude and frequency scaling bit.ly/2OK9D48
The MIT logo, with SVG lines instead of polygons bit.ly/2zoJoLq
Small cities, big companies bit.ly/2OJlQGf. Had no idea that all of them were so close.
Big cities in France bit.ly/2znjl76. If I looked longer, I would probably see a circle here.
Inductance of a coil (in two long lines of code) bit.ly/2OJtuQW
Passengers per unit time bit.ly/2O2ufrg. Do you find such intuition approximately correct/useful? If I raise the average speed of the wagon to 60km/h (hardly reality here) and preserve the average car speed (55km/h), both vehicle types would transport the same number of passengers if the road had four individual lanes (and if all car seats were busy which is overly optimistic). Perhaps I could have integrated the costs of the road and the rails in some way if I knew them.
Lines moving towards the labels "ARD", "ZDF" and "VOX" bit.ly/2ODZNkk.I was willing to change the angles of the lines for each program, but fiddling with lots of numbers was simply not worth the time.
In case you looked for some code and came across a page seemingly having what you were after, with snippets created by someone who mixed lines of code without having a clue, while at the same time having them skillfully divided by ads in-between, you were probably subject to scam. The trouble is that it becomes increasingly harder even for a skilled individual to distinguish fake from real code, when one mimics the other so well. After being bitten this time, I am already weighing how this could affect the availability of programmers (including myself) in the future.
A positive point also deserves mentioning: software quality advances decreased download and parsing times dramatically, which becomes very visible when one tries to move over 19 vols of content. Only several years ago that would have taken much longer.
Wrote a script to download the abstracts from the JMLR site with the idea to look for common keywords in them. Practically impossible to guarantee the absense of HTTP errors. Placing try-catch blocks to avoid premature script end helped to gather only very small amounts of data (106kB). Update: Fixed my mistake where I had for some reason "http" attached twice only to some URLs. At the end parsing the HTML was impossible only for ten links, but I noticed that someone has linked PDF files where the HTML abstracts should have been present, which somewhat explains the behavior of the script. The most common keywords bit.ly/2OFHcnU in the 2.1MB file had to do with learning, data, algorithms, models, methods, results, approaches, performance, functions, kernels, analysis, classification, regression, training, Bayesianism and errors. This means that if someone looked for papers mentioning the term "regression", they would find that the 303 occurrences of the word appeared in the abstracts of a total of 285 papers, which are further reduced to 84 papers if we require the keyword to be in the title too. And "algorithm" appears in 986 paper abstracts. This is *not* including any of the special issues or special topics. We could also find the authors with the most papers bit.ly/2OFpssE, observing that many are already well-known in the scientific community. Cannot even think of what could be hidden inside the abstracts or the contents of the entire series of NIPS proceedings.
3D scans have shown that plants try to make optimal tradeoffs between building a network that allows nutrients to be transported quickly and the cost of maintaining the network. Natural optimizers according to an article in Wired.
Is there such a weapon called "silencer" in Wolfenstein? Is someone on your team already using it?
Olive production in European countries (2007-2018) bit.ly/2OIrOY4
Monthly visitors of the library branches in Espoo, Finland (2009-2018) bit.ly/2OE1JJk
"Tips on visiting 26 national parks, straight from park employees" ti.me/2NXjaaW ↗
Libraries in Austin, Texas bit.ly/2OzO5XW (Source: Austin Public Library, "Austin Public Library Locations", bit.ly/2OBSnxP). 24 branches with a slight shift to the East.
If you have a project you seek to complete and think that it could be of interest to me and have a concrete budget in mind, feel free to propose it. Direct work with me is also the best way to support and enable one or more of the small contributions you see.
An attempt to visualize the age of the trees in Delft bit.ly/2NVfeXZ. Dark green indicates younger trees, lighter green older trees and grey—trees with unknown planting year. If not mistaken, some eastern areas of the city have somewhat darker green. Sadly, the youngest tree was given as 6 years old, while the oldest was over 300 years (is this even possible or is it a mistake in the data?). Within the total of 35146 trees, only five species had more than 1000 exemplars: London plane (2188), European ash (2184), White willow (1857), Huntingdom elm (1306) and Sycamore maple (1150).
Street lights in Delft, The Netherlands bit.ly/2Oz0knp
Always struggling to remember which color temperature corresponds to which label bit.ly/2NWDSYi. Possibly a demo material if you'd like to implement a slider, dynamically changing colors and labels on dragging.
If at one point in time you thought about integrating a payment system into your service, but then after some initial research you discarded most systems for being too complex or not exactly meeting your requirements, I can fully understand that. Developing a single system is already hard enough to justify carrying a second burden on your back. Burden that doesn't add much value to your initial offer, but potentially maintenance costs during the evolution of this additional software. Sometimes speed and flexibility are more important than having automated payments. Especially for small businesses having a small number of infrequent transactions. Better to have them face-to-face after ensuring you can truly help this client and also feel motivated to do so! With third-party payment services you can never be sure about the fan-out of your data.
Went on the Nissan's website and looked at the specifications of a car model. (The idea was to build a data matrix to compare models I knew nothing about.) As with other car sites, noticed that the photos were quite heavy. Tried to avoid some by disabling JavaScript. But this also disabled all spefication data and made it inaccessible, the buttons stopped working and an endless spinner remained at the top. Except the top menu, practically nothing else worked on this page anymore. An obvious case for the need of hiring a better web designer.
Can no longer remember the publication, but saw a visible image of what happens when light passing diagonally though windows and installations above them (whose name I forgot) touches the floor of a building. It looked like a two-dimensional kernel density estimation with shading according to the light intensities. My first thought: "An invisible, natural KDE!".
Developing new materials with new properties and applications is quite important. We are still using concrete for buildings, ceramics for teracotta, wood for furniture, glass for windows and bottles, plastics for pens and enclosures, paper for (note-)books, leather for coats, silicon for CPUs. Problem is, the tried and tested sometimes isn't the least costly, especially in the long term and in the presence of waste. Sometimes, after looking at some flexible code pulling in selected functionality from 7-8 external libraries (again selected out of many), I ask myself why normal materials can't be made that way. If mixing five colors (being the vertices of a regular pentagon inscribed in the color wheel) can lead to a harmonious result, why can't mixing five of the proper materials produce a new one with desirable properties? How does the material wheel look like and why aren't there 16 million options?
While reading one of the many reports on solar the other day, an association about a fully solar-enabled car striked me. Then I quickly forgot about it, sinking into the words that followed. But I imagined a car whose surface is made of a receptive material that directly stores energy in the car battery. Likely nothing new, but that would further reduce the reliance/dependence on charging stations. If someone forgot their car parked in the sun, at least it won't be only hot, but also charged. (Also saw a video of a Bugatti car with body made of Lego pieces.) Can a car be made to harvest energy from a hot, sun-lit road over which it naturally moves? Is there a way to have conducting roads which are safe for living things, but charging for cars, with the option to be "turned on" once, from a distance? Not sure, not sure.
A quick idea on ad efficiency bit.ly/2NYuXpz
Wondered whether there is a formula by which one can estimate the near-optimal distance between two streetlights, so that their illuminatied areas do not overlap, given their height and luminous flux. Retrofittings probably influence this distance as well.
"This open data initiative was axed..." Makes me want to cover myself behind a stable wall and periodically look whether this "presentation" has ended.
Per capita CO2 emissions (in tons) by authority in Plymouth, UK (2005-2014) bit.ly/2OtVQhU. Not sure what caused the vertical spikes in this case. An overall trend towards a slight decrease in the emissions can be observed (notice that this is still a log scale). London had the most emissions, but gradually worked towards decreasing them. As you can see, other authorities with high per capita emissions (avoided grand total emissions due to their lower descriptiveness) were North Lincolnshire, Redcar and Cleveland and Rutland. (Having no idea where they are.)
Adelaide (Australia) has many London plane, Common hackberry and Desert ash trees, while Bristol (United Kingdom) has many Sycamore, European lime and Common ash trees. London planes take the 4th place (2717).
"Focus only on what you can immediately influence through your work" is a phrase that would also fit the goal of a banker (or a CEO) quite well. "Deal only with your matter and don't disturb me while collecting my billions". Unfair enough.
Library visits by year and branch in York, UK (2011-2018) bit.ly/2OsmK9L (Source: data.yorkopendata.org, City of York Council, "Performance Indicators : Art and Culture", bit.ly/2OBE38M). Some gaps are present when data was not available. "York Explore" has registered a lot more visitors than other branches.
Monthly NO2 values at different locations in York, UK bit.ly/2Ox3FTW. This one looks a bit scary. According to the data provided by York City Council ("Readings - NO2", bit.ly/2xiIY7C), ppb differs from miicrogram per cubic meter. Not sure whether there is a formula to convert between the two.
Libraries in Pasadena, California bit.ly/2xdqF3V (through this city's open data portal). Hopefully accurate.
Total installed solar capacity in some countries in 2017 bit.ly/2D2Z3Uo
"Industrial farming a cause of plummeting bird populations" on.natgeo.com/2D3rD81
Birds waiting for bikes bit.ly/2D2TF3w. Retrieved from the Philadelphia Public Art API bit.ly/2D2U71I, which has so much great content that it can fully overwhelm even a programmer like me. Just take a look of the content theme categories bit.ly/2D1nscQ.
In the "Where we ride" report by the League of American Bicyclists you can see the cities with the most bicyclists in 2017 bit.ly/2xkaTEg. Davis (CA), Santa Cruz (CA) and Boulder (CO) are the only three having more than 10% of the commuters riding bikes.
First time seeing such a way for bicycles and cars to switch lanes before a crossroad bit.ly/2D2LzrE
Libraries in Windsor, Ontario, Canada bit.ly/2D5lBnD. I doubt you could bring any sandwiches inside.
Twenty of the most common descriptions from restaurant inspections in Alameda County bit.ly/2DfrgaT (Source: data.acgov.org, Alameda County Environmental Health, bit.ly/2D1YAC3). Unfortunately, some of the texts have been cut in the original data as well, but the rest of the details hint that the majority of the inspections had positive results. But it is still good to see what inspectors tend to look at, especially when the majority of homes have a kitchen that needs to be properly maintained. "Birds inside" even added an element of fun to my life this morning.
Historic energy consumption by county in California (1990-2016) bit.ly/2D1hZD9 (Source: California Energy Commission, "Energy consumption by county", bit.ly/2Dbqmw2)
Expecting melatonin and body temperature to reach their maximums soon bit.ly/2D4ivQD
I agree with the statement that people buy with their eyes first; aesthetics is perhaps where the work here appears to be lacking. I fear that I don't have an easy fix for this as everytime I focus exclusively on it, my consciousness interferes asking about the point of that, pushing me to either try solving a problem or create a short narrative to engage the mind instead (or in addition). Do you have an advice how to deal with that?
With mattresses you have to be slightly more careful than with pans bit.ly/2xeNLqK, judging from the area you get per unit price (from a brochure). The double spacing could even support you if you have the tendency to jump like a fish at night.
Capacity per unit area (kg/m²) for some Schindler elevators bit.ly/2CYecq5
The winner of the Berlin marathon (Eliud Kipchoge) ran slightly over 2 hours at an average speed of 20.81km/h. This could probably qualify as a "bike speed" as well. Equally impressive to the news of the 102-year old woman also winning a running competition for elderly people. Hints that many things are possible if our thinking doesn't constrain us to believe in some hard limits.
Decided to codify and visualize the knowledge shared in an article on group communication bit.ly/2D1YwSF, where the recommendation was to have 4 people on a team and no individuals participating in less than 50% of the communication channels. I agree, yet my chart paints a less definitive picture bit.ly/2D0N4Xt.
Your work? Excitatory or inhibitory?
Traffic accidents in Leeds for 2017 bit.ly/2xaz8EU
Parks in the state of Oklahoma, USA bit.ly/2D7FJpg. Many seems to be concentrated in the north-east.
Innovation can easily get to your purse if you have no awareness how it pushes you in almost invisible ways. Consider the nylon bags at the grocery store. You heard that they are not environmentally friendly and should be replaced with paper bags if possible. So you forget about nylon and buy a paper bag, trying to put your goods inside carefully so as not to tear it. But at the end you dislike its durability and realize that paper is made of trees. So you look to the more expensive cotton bags and think that cotton is farmed rather than cut. So you buy yourself a cotton bag to reflect your new consciousness and convince yourself that this is your final decision promoting you to an "eco-friendly" person. After all, even clothes are made of cotton, which seems to reinforce this decision. Now comes an expert and tells you that in the production of cotton bags too much water has been used—also not sustainable. The new recommendation? A plastic bag made from two recycled plastic bottles having the best durability, but also the highest price. Would you buy that one too, please? Before you know it, you silently purchased all products in this innovation path, contributing to the corporate profits by convincing yourself that you need to "belong" to the category of people who save the Earth. Which at the end worked against you. Sometimes, the same approach is followed to encourage people to spend thousands of dollars, not just cents. Consider the iPhone series for example. Did you upgrade everytime a new model appeared? If so, you probably bought ten phones, but always used only one, wasting a whole lot of money to "comply" to this innovation path. And your "lifetime value" is probably still not exhausted, especially with increasing innovation speed and frequency of product announcements. Might feel like a rat's race just to stay on track. Peer/partner pressure seem to be common reasons how we seek to justify our purchases, when we dislike looking bad in the eyes of others.
"Debt has tanked more farms than drought, flooding and pestillence combined" - an excerpt from a recent book on farming. I don't necessarily think that the unpredictability of nature is completely disconnected from this debt—perhaps it's a contributing factor. Self-sustainability seems so often out of reach. But zero-energy buildings have shown that eventually the concept of zero-food people too might be inevitable, with increases in the population and the depletion of productive soil.
Glanced through the "Wind Technologies Market Report 2017" by the US Deparment of Energy to discover a table of the cumulative wind capacities by country bit.ly/2xdoTQ5. Learned that installing turbines with lower specific power (= amount of total energy generation / swept rotor area of the blades) can not only allow building projects at lower quality wind sites, but their generated output can be even higher than of turbines with higher specific power at better sites. The increase in rotor diameters effectively reduces the specific power; in 2017 the average reached 113m by an average hub height of 86m. Existing projects can reuse old hubs while upgrading old, small rotors with bigger ones. While turbine prices have fallen to $750-950/kW in 2017, the cost to integrate wind energy into the grid was said to be additional $5-20/MWh.
Particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and ozone (O₃) levels in Sofia, Bulgaria (20.01.2016 - 19.06.2018) bit.ly/2x9Q9ze
It frequently appeared to me that the traffic lights are too bright, maybe even annoyingly so. It wasn't until reading a paper that I understood that they were designed to accomodate for the average driver, assuming deteriorated sight and suboptimal reaction times. In such cases, bright lights could potentially help to save people lives. Designing the interface for the most common user reminds me of the beautiful work of Jakob Nielsen. No longer selfish in front of the lights.
When I read about minimizing the walkpaths in public buildings in an attempt to improve service, I remember the length of some walkways I had to move on. They were so long that by the time I went ≈65% of the total distance (fast walking), it was already red and cars were starting to show against me, so I had to run quickly until the end. Extremely long, no intermediate pavements to keep safe from cars and practically open to be hit by cars coming from/going to three different directions (the walkway is below an "U"). Plenty of opportunity for incidents just by design. Cannot even imagine what happens with older people who can't walk fast—they probably remain slightly before the 50% and wonder in which direction to go first to protect themselves from being hit.
A reportage showed how someone in Berlin was looking for a roommate and "90" candidates appeared. I only saw a long line, but couldn't count so fast. Finding a room there seems such a severe problem that without a well-supporting salary one would quickly have to live on the street. Possibly a problem for local businesses looking to attract international talent, since new people don't like the risk of having sky-high relocation costs they won't be able to cover. Another man with a small boy sticked ads on pillars in the hope that someone offering a room would call. One woman did. Price point: 900 euro/month.
Publishing a scientific paper every five days on average is a quite impressive practice. Must have contributed to my diminishing interest to explore ones with seemingly interesting topics, containing results mostly irrelevant to my work. The day the good papers will be hard to come by?
Which car would you prefer: one with a 60l tank that uses 7l/100km or one with a 45l tank that uses 5.5l/100km (on average)? If you looked at the ratios, the first car would have ≈4.7% more longevity. The question is whether this matters if it has to carry 33.3% more fuel to realize this advantage.
Average airline passenger miles per person and nationality (2017) bit.ly/2NJJW6o. The bar length is computed by dividing the total passenger miles (number on the left) by the total population for these countries (2016) as seen on Wikipedia. Relatively seen, people in UK seem to travel a lot.
Three block rotation bit.ly/2NChvYf
Always wondered why flights to the same destination by different carriers aren't batched and operated at the same time. Came to the website of the London's Heathrow Airport for the first time and this is exactly what I saw under departure times.
Historic number of visitors, beer price and beer consumption at Oktoberfest bit.ly/2MrkhdS. Strange that the increasing beer prices haven't caused lack of interest. According to this data, the beer consumption even increased, closely following the price curve. The official prices for 2018 will be once again higher bit.ly/2NFJW7l. Unfortunately, being around alcohol and its consumers has never been of any interest to me.
Number of top universities and median university rank by country having more than ten bit.ly/2NGcEoJ. Didn't expect to see Netherlands rank so high. Fewer universities with higher ranks says something about quality and efficiency. Never had the chance to visit this country or experience what it is to study at one of these top places.
Median electricity usage (in KWh) by building in Leeds (07.01.2015 - 11.12.2016) bit.ly/2Mq5tfz. Many schools and two libraries appear in the upper half of the list.
Projected carbon sequestration at four woodlands (England, Scottland, Wales, Northern Ireland) bit.ly/2NEK7zT. First time seeing anything like this. The effort to assign a quantity to all these projects must have been non-trivial. Surprised that the woodlands in Scottland span a much wider area than those in Wales, but are expected to extract almost 50% less CO2/hectar. Wondering whether this can be due to the type of the trees, their age, condition, density or something else.
"Come back after ten minutes." I often feel strange after hearing this. Someone is asking me to move aimlessly around slightly longer than I feel comfortable and slightly shorter than to be able to do something else and return. Arriving at the same location twice is a case for optimization. But the second appearance could be for something small—be it short communication, information, blood test results, exam results or something else. All of these can be checked in a location-independent way, only if the right organization was into place. It is sufficient to assign a unique ID to each individual and allow database lookups for information availability. Much more convenient than wasting everyone's time.
There are 60 pharmacies (Apotheken) in Graz, Austria bit.ly/2MkMSBO (Source: Stadt Graz - data.graz.gv.at, bit.ly/2NAj74E)
Sometimes positive impact could be about something small and simple as making people see themselves differently, think about the world in a new light, energize and inspire those around them or see themselves as locomotives rather than passengers. Awakening the dream-doers within. Fostering the sense of collective awareness, positivity and mutual "take foot-throw high" support. Causing more eyes to spark and more hearts to beat faster. Nature gave us two roots and two branches (raise your hands) and taught us that it is up to us to grow in all possible directions. Directions that stimulate each other through the resources they separately acquire and a governing decision how to spread them effectively so as to accelerate further growth. A plant having insufficient number of branches and leaves grows much slower than one which can catch up light through many leaves on position-diversified branches. It's of very little use to pretend being a single branch. In fact, one of the saddest things to see is probably a low branching factor. Thankfully, this is solvable (and you can do it too!): see what's available, think what's potentially missing and bring new nutrients/materials to excite this single branch and make it want to run! Periodically check and be checked.
As a child, I remember capturing a photo and then few hours later reading that software is even inside digital cameras. Really? I just pressed buttons here and there and looked at a tiny screen, but had no idea that this is called "software". How did this "invisible" thing sneak unnoticed? How did it integrate itself (as something living) into this plastic unit? Can I "rework" it fully? Myriad of questions.
You rarely pay only for the separate flowers, but also for the aesthetics of the whole arrangement. Whether you understand software as a complex structure of interconnected modules or see it more as separate, unrelated units that can be added or removed as needed (without much thought) may help to determine whether you can fully appreciate its value or not.
While the price of good software or a good website is unknown in advance, since it depends on the unique requirements of the client, the value that both deliver can rarely be denied. Businesses which don't work directly with the specialists capable of doing that work for them, but rely on generic work that is cheap and widely accessible, will quickly find themselves irrelevant relative to their competition.
If you needed six months to study a new framework that will be popular for three, the next time expect to have even less time.
Ran a quick comparison between some LG OLED and LED TVs bit.ly/2NzEMKk. The goal was to check (as far as it is possible from often misleading specifications) whether OLED as a technology brings an improvement in energy consumption over LED. As you can see from this limited sample of devices, OLED seems to help reduce the overall weight of the TVs. However, some LED models in the LG portfolio are still more refined in their energy consumption than newer OLED devices. Eventually this gap may close with further advancements.
Saw an article with a photo of a cyclist carrying long "noodles" attached at the back of the bike (in Toronto). The reason looked self-explanatory—sending the message "keep that much distance" to the drivers approaching from behind. The article gave a hint about some incidents with cyclists in the past. This led me to check the National Collision Database, which contains an enormous amount of content. But it quickly overwhelmed my machine, converting any attempt to learn from it into wasted time. The data was full of abbreviations and only the data dictionary was sufficient to keep me busy for at least half an hour. It would have been nice if we could group by "P_USER", having value of 4 (cyclist) (if I understood correctly, "V_TYPE" equal to 17 relates to a bike initiating a collision, whereas I was interested only in cyclists that were hit) and then grouping by "P_ISEV" and counting how many values of this variable are 1 (no injury), 2 (injury) or 3 (fatality). Could have given at least a very basic understanding about this unconventional behavior on the streets. Update: Found a way. Since the start of 1999 (for a 19-year period) there were 9278 cases with no injury, 125366 injuries and 1003 fatalities. Be aware that these numbers are at country level and not just for Toronto. Concrete locations were not available.
Payments which aren't lead to lacking contributions.
Can users turn off functionality they don't need and if so how easy is this to do? Is the corresponding functionality code loaded (but not invoked) or fully discarded?
Yesterday, going through country profile reports, wondered what percentage of the countries exporting high amount of gold also export high amount of alcohol or tobacco and why this was the case. Clueless, but observant.
Thinking that only web designers have to deal with minimizing the round trip time may be a slightly limiting view. The light that enters the body of a refractor also has to arrive at the other side with the minimum back and forth between the lenses. According to a paper, minimum round trip time seems to be important in that context too.
Whose responsibility is it? Of the TV to reduce the volume itself once it notices that you are accepting a phone call; of the voice recognition system awaiting the proper voice command from you while your words are channeled elsewhere; of the mobile phone to instruct the TV to get silent or your own—to find the remote control and push the right button as quickly as possible? With software we also ask the first question often.
Inserted a dynamic variable into a strangely looking piece of code: print([((i + 3) & ~3) for i in range(12)]). Starts from zero and immediately increments by 4, "remembering" the last number for 4 iterations before incrementing once again. Interesting.
Mini effect: animated letter spacing bit.ly/2CEhNt4
If someone can get 50 thousand views of their bad code and only a small fraction of the viewers decide to adopt it inside their own projects without any questioning or alteration, very soon everyone will be able to call themselves "expert". The fast multiplication of bad code gradually pushes the good one out of view (what many people hope for as long as their code is seen). Then you hear: "This is how it's done here".
Is the user able to resume the last action they were not able to finish or do they have to repeat the entire sequence?
Curious what kind of conditions can affect a sensor reading, how long the max delay time can be and whether this could be life-threatening in some situations.
Idea: How big is the minimum file length (in terms of characters) using names (for variables & functions) whose intention would be easiest to grasp by a newcomer on the team?
The idea of updating a vector of coordinates directly with another vector leads to much cleaner code than using three lines to touch the coordinates separately.
The things that appear most scary often seem to work at a nanolevel. Invisible and very hard to do something about them. The dust in the air we breathe, the mucus on the keyboard we touch, the infectious microparticles set in flight after the running water collides with excrements and so on. Talk about chemicals, bacteria, interactive 3D models of amino acids or complex graphs of protein-protein interactions, apoptosis, melting telomeres or something else and you'll have me. The beauty is, as scared as I could be, this would also provoke interest in me. Someone said that not knowing what you don't know can really hurt you, but this is not the only reason. It could hurt many other people as well. My small programming practice has taught me that if we cannot understand the things at the smallest level, we cannot expect to understand the reasons for the inefficiencies at large scale. There is a relatively high probability that an inefficient program is already doing something inefficient at the level of a single iteration. Or it tries to do much more than needed. Do you apply the microscopic view on all of your work (possibly using a "camera" for real-time on-monitor projections of micro-events)?
Not traveling much also means that you value your time and make no energy-wasting movements for the wrong reasons. A life on (an aimless) go has never been enjoyable or meaningful to me. Even the most magnificent location will have to undergo the "What will I do there?" test, most likely failing to provide what I am looking for. (If you'd like to understand what this is, look much further than the first bit.) Neither pleasures nor experiences unrelated to important work ever mattered to me. Absolutely here for something more than that.
It is not too hard to track the number of visitors of a park at the main entrance. Problem is that by this (cheaper) approach it is harder to understand which of the many attractions people find more appealing or willing to visit again. You could also walk around and make yourself a picture of the situation ("The Toyota way"), trying to gauge this, but it means that your time cannot be spent doing something else. It also becomes harder to gain accurate, actionable insight at attraction level. And if you put your attractions near the fence, making them visible to everyone, having no infrastructure that organizes the park into separate themes, then it is not surprising that most people will look from the outside and dissuade themselves about paying the full ticket price. If what they could see inside is the same, only more closely, then the whole composition had planning issues. Can you think of a commercial web application whose code was available to everyone to see?
You could probably create a beautiful SVG bird combining many shapes and shades, but is this the most efficient way to do it? Manual vertex pushing can be slow and nerve-exhausting. Much easier is to push the vertices in a more direct way inside a graphic editor. Choosing the best tool for the job has to be priority unless experimentation and learning are seen as more important.
Tried some milled flax seed, sunflower seed and sesame mixed with 2 teaspoons of honey until dense. Seems energizing. Another option would be to make forms and put them in the camera for a while.
Not having a phone means that you are not disturbed at the wrong time of the day by the wrong person/advertiser, don't capture photos/selfies just because you can, don't swipe endlessly, don't have "keyboard issues", don't use navigation at an unknown place (but your mouth to ask questions), don't care constantly about battery levels and "base" bills every month, don't read QR codes to log in etc. Makes me feel more human and knowing that whatever happens, my presence/availability can never be assumed as something granted. And if someone wants to keep contact with me, they have to show it in some memorable way. If not, they are free to substitute me with their Facebook friends.
Curious about Orbit nutrition facts, but on the site I see something blurred (once I spin the blister) and zeros almost everywhere. Well, these widespread chewing gums available at the exits of most supermarkets must contain something after all.
Do you believe that if you knew the characteristics of all creatures in a game, machine learning could help you find out more efficient ones to play with? Not a player myself, but data is everywhere.
If you see a variable monster_type and your brain automatically fills the gap, it's probably time to wish someone a great start in the new week!
The website has to representative of your company. And if this doesn't work for some reason, you can still comfort yourself with some representative "pannekaker" bit.ly/2Nxwx16
Did you know which countries were the biggest importers and exporters of clothing in 2017? bit.ly/2O2SC4R
Smart litter bins provide actionable data when they need to be emptied bit.ly/2O35s2O. No more overflowing/creeping garbage on the streets.
Retail sales index Ireland (2005-2016) bit.ly/2O8N8Fu
"Higher salaries increase the inflation". Strange what lower salaries do. Or long-term stagnant salaries gradually eaten by inflation. Are you still finding workers?
Number of passengers at the Glasgow airport (2007-2014) bit.ly/2M8b769 (Source: Glasgow Open Data, bit.ly/2O0mjDr). Since 2011, the number of passengers has started to increase, although at a slower pace than the previous decline. Complete monthly data since 2015 was not available.
Went on a walk through Italy to visit as many cities as possible while paying attention to exhaust the least amount of energy bit.ly/2McHXmt. Started early at Modica and arrived at Sanremo in the late computational hours.
Nature of the 311 service requests in Philadelphia bit.ly/2NqyHjb. An impressive number of 1.357 million requests (or 60.93% of all) were information-related. Perhaps a well thought out information campaign could somewhat alleviate the burden on the service.
Locations with seized opioids by county and opioid type in Pennsylvania bit.ly/2M9Z0FN. Due to my bad geography, initially I thought that the big dot could refer to Philadelphia. Thanks to your effort and proper labeling, revealing some addiitional context prevented me from making wrong claims.
This time didn't even attempt to plot—no resources for that. Among the top 10 most expensive building permits in Chicago (Source: Chicago Data Portal, bit.ly/2NtwZ0v) out of a total of 545763 with an estimated total cost of ≈119.785 billion dollar and a median of 3600 dollar, most were labeled either "renovation/alteration" or "new construction". The first place takes a permit for electric wiring with estimated cost containing only 9s (close to 1e10). The centroid of all projects coincides with the "UIC College of Medicine" (if you wish, type the values 41.870460 and -87.672954 in Nominatim bit.ly/2DA6NNF to see this).
Top100 global companies by market capitalization bit.ly/2M9P9Qh. If among them, we obtain the sum of all capitalizations per branch for 2018, we see bit.ly/2NYvynR that operating in the technology sector seems to create a lot of value.
NO2 and PM10 sensor measurements at six locations with known geocoordinates in Camden, UK (01.03.2017-12.08.2018) bit.ly/2CwUKR1 (Source: data.gov.uk, "Air Quality Monitoring Sensor", bit.ly/2Cy1n5C). I will leave the interpretation to you.
17 * x = 16 * x + x = (x << 4) + x. By doing nothing, the right has become faster than the left. Bit material.
When in such a small snippet of code bit.ly/2oNN17p two title and one alt attribute repeat the same long content, how could you expect your page to be less than 5MB after inclusion of all stories? The SEO chains are heavy.
The cost of disrespect is similar to the cost of a dangling pointer, which is valid for the lifetime of a program, whereas this is valid for the lifetime of a client. That said, it is extremely important to me that I don't serve the same bad client twice.
Walney Extension Wind Park was finished today bit.ly/2Cy6Fhg ↗ (659MW)
Most parkings in Singapore seem to be working day and night bit.ly/C8RWpi (yet none of them are free)
After learning about the merger between Kaufhof and Karstadt (see bit.ly/2oMCUQq) and that this is expected to lead to a loss of ≈5000 jobs in Germany, I decided to find the locations of their branches and see whether they overlap significantly. My logic was that close locations may see a greater level of job integration, disproportionally affecting some workers there. According to this diagram bit.ly/2Cp3999, there are at least four clusters with such characteristic. The final decision is unlikely to consider only geolocation, but also branch profitability, worker productivity and many other factors.
Noticed that latest Chrome has slightly changed the tabs and now makes it more visible when the address bar is focused. This is all good, but doesn't fully solve some minor problems. For instance, animating growing and shrinking tabs is still slow on slow machines and the combined experience matters much more than the one with a single tab. It is slow to open a link in a new tab, where some internal algorithm causes Chrome to put it after the current one instead of at the end of the entire tab sequence. This way most tabs are pushed to the right once on open and then to the left on close, which is slow. (In contrast, operating on a tab at the end of the list is much faster—only one has to be animated.) We have discussed already the cost of reflow on websites, but still, for some reason, we allow it to happen with such a heavily used concept like the tabs. As long as the number of tabs is unclear in advance and all have to be shown, there will always be a need to adjust the tab width (most likely with animation). If instead, the browser could set a sensible default in its settings (say 20-30 tabs) and bring a slider allowing the user to adjust this limit once they have exceeded it (and don't want to close another one), the width of a single tab can be static and known in advance. This then allows tabs to be animated on the smaller side (bottom-top on open and top-bottom on close) instead of on the longer side (left-right and right-left), enabling a "treat two like one" concept. This means that a "+" sign is located at the middle of a "frame-only" tab (of the same size & easily clickable) and once clicked is animated in direction towards the top, gradually revealing the new "real" tab at its bottom and filling the empty frame. Once reaching the top, the "+" sign reappears again at the bottom in a new "frame-only" tab that has grown at the same time with the real tab on the right of it. This concept came to me after remembering how asteroids reappeared at the other side of the screen in an "Astro" game. New tab and "frame-only" tab can be animated vertically and treated together, but only the "frame-only" tab is filled on open or emptied on close. The 20-30 tabs limit can also serve to reduce the size of the "working set" and thus overall memory usage by making the undesirable harder to achieve. This can lead to a snappier interface with the browser offering a helping hand rather than letting users lose track of how they are currently utilizing the machine resources as a result of their tab interactions. With fewer tabs, the cost of switching from one to another may become less than 1.5s on a slow machine. Perhaps not a concept to adopt enthusiastically, but at least one that it shareable.
Streets in Chapel Hill, North Carolina bit.ly/2wPeEAO. Some are missing, mainly to save on computation time.
Diagram showing the percent of change in vehicle fuel economy, horsepower and weight for new cars bit.ly/2oKjNGA. After 2005 fuel economy has started to improve significantly, but reductions in weight became less common. If I read this correct.
Came to the "ZEW Monitoring Report Wirtschaft Digital 2018" and saw an interesting diagram showing the results of a survey of the factors inhibiting digitalization (contains German). Then made small additions (in English) to each point, which I thought were appropriate bit.ly/2wLUxE7
If you make your "In den Warenkorb" button larger than the photo of the product on sale bit.ly/2CmiVRX, what message does this send to potential clients? That you are more interested to close the sale rather than inform about the value of your product. Your needs are put before theirs. A good designer can "catch" such problems before they occur and minimize the potential harm on the business. Indeed, an invisible form of work, sometimes having very visible results.
On the cost of a biscuit in cylindrical pack bit.ly/2wK7UVy. Forgot to mention that if you finished one in five bites on average, the cost of a single bite would come at 0.0234. If you forget about this, the middle cocoa layer will quickly tempt you into overspending.
Finished reading an article about Altered: water nozzles, which have multiple modes allowing flow between 0.2 and 4l/min. They say that conventional taps can deliver up to 10-12l/min (where most of the water barely touches the surface and ends down the drain), where we rarely need more than 4l/min. The mist mode (0.2l/min) distributes tiny drops over a bigger surface, which may be great for hands and plates. Theoretically, this means that by choosing the most conservative setting (4l/min), to fill a container, for instance, someone can be up to 3 times more efficient in their water usage. And by washing hands using mist mode, that number grows to 12/0.2 = 60 times. In my opinion, quite an improvement, considering comfort, cost-efficiency and environmental friendliness. That the product is in a big market and the business has a lot of potential to scale certainly helps even more.
"Your web app is bloated" bit.ly/2wIu4HO ↗. I dislike the last word, but agree with the idea in general. Web sites are becoming more and more memory-hungry as if the technological advancements fully justify this. Cannot test whether the statements are true (I am an unhappy Firefox user). Unsure whether this test was made multiple times, since Google Inbox with 215MB usage looks somewhat suspicious to me. But at least on latest Chrome, a Twitter feed of a sample user takes slightly more than 68576K, while this page (also a feed) takes 34836K.
Unemployment rate as percentage of the state population (given as percentage of the total population) in USA for select years between 2003 and 2015 bit.ly/2Cn0JrE. The idea here was to look for high spreads to estimate which states have the highest absolute number of employed people. Notice that the y-scales are not consistent as I had to rerun the script multiple times to be able to output something more visible. The local economies in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania quickly made an impression (at least in these years). More recent data could paint another picture. The data comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Metro Nashville & Davidson County traffic crashes (2018) bit.ly/2CisLnR. Many crashes were frontal, by good weather and good visibility. Drive carefully.
Ratio between home value and median rent in various census tracts in Indiana (2009-2016) bit.ly/2Cu2jrR (uses data by IU Business Research Center(IBRC)). Additionally, you can see the names of the census tracts with ratio below 100 bit.ly/2oFyn1S. There was also information about household income levels which could have been used for a home value to income ratio, but that would be prohibitively slow here. One day, with a new, modern hardware, this might be possible.
Not understanding Danish, I went to the translator to inform me what people have read most often recently at the library in Aarhus bit.ly/2CePFfU (Data: Aarhus Kommune, "Reserveringer ved Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker", bit.ly/2ChGtYm). Not sure why some numbers disappear in Google's translator. Anyway. It seems that more people seek information about the phenomenon called "pseudo work". "How we got busy doing nothing" reminds me of Robin Sharma's "busy being busy", yet not in the sense of an infinite recursion.
Average number of nights per tourist in Australia (June 2007 - March 2017) bit.ly/2CfLrEU. The data comes from the international visitor survey of the South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC).
Can you remember how many times you had to type month names in your apps and how many typos you've made? bit.ly/2LVHbKn
Some NFL results bit.ly/2PAwFdT. Greens for the winning team, reds for the losing one. Beware that results symmetric with respect to the diagonal aren't equal. For instance, consider Miami Dolfins and New York Jets to understand why. (Good that a matrix view enables us to see this easily). Yet, the fact that most fields stay empty tells us that this is not an optimal representation for the data. We are wasting a lot of screen space and use inconvenient scrollbars here.
Bike stations with more than 1200 bike rentals in at least one month between April 2015 and July 2017 in Belfast, Northern Ireland bit.ly/2PzjXvY
How to "cancel" a log base with the log of the base (in three lines of code) bit.ly/2PshoLU
Stacked bar chart: "Energy usage per capita in Vienna (1988 - 2014)" bit.ly/2PwQ8Md. Usage for agriculture was very low (see the almost invisible segment at the top of each bar). Yesterday, I saw a publication which claimed that transport was the biggest energy user in Ireland. This diagram shows that the same seems to be valid for Austria's capital too (although more data for the period after 2014 could have helped to confirm this).
Whenever "their lack of integration" is mixed with expectations about unconditional slavery, something speaks very wrong at an ethical level. Constantly projecting the shiny picture of the need for integration (to physical/mental death) as something good is nothing more than a pure escape from responsibility. Integrate with your skin-takers, so to speak. Great advice, but one having no place in future Europe.
Good balance. If a normal user takes N continuous photos with their digital camera, does their patience diasppear first (camera speed), does the device easily slip off their hands (ergonomy), do they have to navigate inside deeply nested menus (usability), does the battery die first or the memory card fill up first? A thoughtful designer would have engineered the product for maximum utility during service time, paying attention that the various potentials for failure converge at approximately the same time point. Without testing for that balance, the product may have very good individual strengths, but be useful only for a short time.
If you knew a building permission cost and the number of apartments in this building, the area of the apartment of interest to you, all types of materials used to build it, their approximate amounts and current market prices, the man-hours required and the cost for employee salaries, is it possible to estimate the construction cost of a single apartment and plot it relative to the asking price? Fantasizing, once again.
The European Environmental Agency (EEA) has published a diagram showing emissions in terms of grams of CO₂ per passenger kilometer for different vehicle types bit.ly/2oy9R2R ↗
Didn't know about a special snake with round teeth that is able to take snails out of their shells. Seems like an evolutionary adaptation to the requirements. No more shells in the digestive system.
"To view this content, please install Microsoft Silverlight." If it's content, it must be accessible by default.
BER ratings for the energy performance of buildings as defined by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) bit.ly/2ovhc32 (Source: bit.ly/2ouNTO5)
Libraries with most visitors by branch in Chicago (2011 - 2018) bit.ly/2PnxpCW (Source: Chicago data portal, bit.ly/2PuvGvH). On a log scale. Here you can see the 61 most visited libraries (the 18 least visited were excluded for clarity). The branches "Harold Washington Library Center", "Sulzer Regional", "Edgewater" and "Rogers Park" came more easily into view. Their median visitors for the period are 1122038, 38121, 16561 and 15240 accordingly. This shows that the differences are actually quite big. 2018 is still in progress, so the data there is incomplete.
Highly impressed by the initiative to open the doors of 800 buildings for visitors to see bit.ly/2otmegw ↗. Let's hope that more cities will take a note of this.
Another demo, this time about finding profitable clients bit.ly/2PvY0xR
Finding the median of all 1061 images having dimensions 640x480pixels in the COCO 5k dataset took ≈15min 20sec on my slow machine, using 49.6% of the available RAM. You can see both the median of five selected images bit.ly/2orA96N and the median of all 1061 bit.ly/2PpBSEW. Currently the sun is shining on my screen, so it is hard to distinguish whether there are different grey levels. But at least moving the color picker in GIMP informs that it is an illusion that the color seems uniform. Also interesting is how easy it aappears on the eyes.
Good to see more and more fire departments publishing their raw data. The latest example is the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) (bit.ly/2Pt9qlV, 487.4MB size). We can compute how long it took from the incident creation time to the actual on scene time (where both times were available). For Los Angeles as a whole the median of this "response time" comes exactly at 6 mins and 30 sec. According to the data, the best single response was only after 2 mins and 20 sec. Very often, among the units in a district which responded more than 5 times (manual constraint to somewhat minimize the effect of outliers), we see that unit types indicated as "Engine" or "Truck" have shorter response times than unit types indicated as "Rescue Ambulance" (independent whether ALS, BLS, Reserve or whether the starting indication is RA6 or RA8). Perhaps there is a possible explanation for this. Setting this constraint, the minimum and maximum response times vary between 4 min 49 sec - 4 min 54 sec (for three "engines") and 17 min 49 sec - 19 min 33 sec (for eight ambulances in various districts). A potentially useful action could be to intensify kowledge transfer between the units in districts 14, 9, 11 or 112 with the units in districts 108, 109, 111, 122 and 125, since their median response times can vary up to 2.03 times. Hopefully to the benefit of everyone.
"The online gig economy's 'race to the bottom'" bit.ly/2wsQn48 ↗ “Whoever offers the lowest price, gets the job.” Not surprised. Unfortunately, I don't use freelance sites, because I expect my payment to be significant to be able to accept you as a client. Most of the time this won't be the case, which will also eliminate further possibility to collaborate in the future. But at least you can try your luck elsewhere.
Some IoT wireless technologies and their key performance indicators bit.ly/2NDSLM1
Still mysterious to me why people start using their letters in a paper without feeling the need to explain them. We can do better.
K-means clustering on the specifications of Lexus cars bit.ly/2wu5EBB (Based on a manually created dataset bit.ly/2MDuVTP obtained from their website). Used five components (implying sedan, SUV, coupe, hybrid and performance models) to see whether the clusters would agree with the subdivision shown on the site. (Only the LX 570 appears to form its own cluster, being far from the other SUV models.) Additionally, created an overview matrix bit.ly/2NycbBH and tried to determine which of the selected features are most important in the formation of the price. Curb weight, combined MPG estimate and 0-60mph acceleration time appear to be the top three. The first one seems intuitive: heavier cars likely use more material and/or components, which can be expected to raise their price. But here price changes seem to depend less on the car's horsepower. Sometimes hybrid models had no torque given, which means that they appear in blue, as if having the lowest value in the matrix. (In the dataset, a value of -1 indicates a missing value.) The diagram allows us to observe even minor differences like in the top track speed of RWD and AWD models (among other things). A paper which claimed that the drag coefficient must by multiplied by the car's frontal area and form a minimal overall result for improved aerodynamics inspired me to determine the five models that best fit this definition. Enjoy!
Label infused with the colors of an image bit.ly/2Nwr47N. Not as beautiful as the inspiration itself bit.ly/2wroZn7
This library also demonstrates the value of careful element positioning bit.ly/2ws17Q1 as part of great design. Positioning is what allows us to design with text only. Rich content made available with no sense of good positioning is often like a chunk of pasted, needless code.
Total annual visits of Toronto Public Library branches (log scale, 2012-2017) bit.ly/2NzqypC. The Fairview branch enjoyed a nice increase in the number of visitors. It also has the second-largest parking area (114 spaces compared to Richview's 129) and good program attendance in more recent years. In terms of the size of its cardhoder base, it is third, only after North York Central Library and Toronto Reference Library. Almost all branches offered a large number of rooms to rent—a service which I haven't seen elsewhere developed to such extent (many libraries seem to have a deficit of rooms to store all the content).
Fish flakes bit.ly/2MAZJoy. Uses SVG to naturally hide objects that appeared earlier.
Bus stops and approximate routes in Savannah, Georgia (July 2017) bit.ly/2wqDKpY
Air temperature and global radiation at two different weather stations in Zürich (August 2018) bit.ly/2NtRK99 (Source: "Messwerte der Wetterstationen der Wasserschutzpolizei Zürich", bit.ly/2MBRRD6). Interesting what happened at 26.08.2018. The first weather station registered a much lower air temperature than usual, while the second saw a much lower global radiation at that time. But I wouldn't say that the two are necessarily connected.
Population changes in the districts of Basel, Switzerland (2007-2016) bit.ly/2MBaW8h. For some reason, Rosental's population has increased a lot in the more recent years (relatively seen).
Homeless counts in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada bit.ly/2NqwaC9. Not sure how realistic it is to set the expected number of homeless people to be always 40% of the total, independent of whether they were sheltered or not and independent of the year.
Used data provided by the Australian Government to look at the traffic counts at three selected locations in Melbourne bit.ly/2NpMPWM. According to it, west bound traffic at West Gate btw. Ramps at Western Link seems to peak around 16:00-17:00. West bound traffic at Monash Freeway btw. Huntingdale Road and Forster Road seems to peak around 06:00-07:00, while east bound traffic at Tullamarine Freeway btw. Ramps at Mount Alexander Road—an hour later. What surprised me a bit was that weekends/holidays appeared frequently in the top 20 busiest locations. Could this be a sign that the citizens of Melbourne are quite active during recreation time?
Total water withdrawals by water-use category and state, 2015 (million gallons per day) bit.ly/2NrhEdA (Source: USGS). Thermoelectric power and irrigation used the most water (41% & 37% of the total). Some categories (like thermoelectric power, industrial and mining) are further subdivided into fresh and saline water usage. Use of water for irrigation was especially intensive in California, Idaho and Arkansas. Pennsylvania used slightly more water than New York for domestic needs. Indiana and Louisiana used the most fresh water for industrial needs, while Nevada used it in mining. Water usage of 322 billion gallons/day divided by a population of 325 million means that the average use per individual comes at 990.76gallons (or ≈3750l) each day. Not exactly a small footprint, although it is much lower than the 7346.91l/day reached in 1975 bit.ly/2MZv0Rh. What percentage of the total usage could be attributed to losses due to leakage or excessive watering (also in the absence of droughts) is another interesting question.
Blue-red band around function bit.ly/2MUMTkd
Saucepans bit.ly/2MS2bGx. The largest model seems to offer the best litres/price ratio. For 33% higher price you get almost 45% higher ratio. But with the products from other companies, this could be different.
Comb bit.ly/2PagoMk. Single element, sharpened for smoother movements. Chaotic, thin, multi-element material waiting.
How much music could there be in an icecream? bit.ly/2MSd4rL Creates false rumours on demand.
Most of the polyhedra I have seen so far had two different face types at most, which led me to assume that having more could be especially hard to achieve. Imagine this surprise bit.ly/2LpimGs
Someone used a mathematical model to estimate the operating costs of a 3D printer bit.ly/2LvtaTr
Degrees of freedom bit.ly/2LrLDQM
Do you have a cropping calendar? bit.ly/2LsqW7p
A nice diagram about the annual average solar insolation in Texas bit.ly/2LrF4O0. Can you confirm that the solar radiation follows such interesting geographical distribution and that the difference is that big? Especially liked the added scale indicator.
"Tree of life" bit.ly/2MOF3su ↗
Traffic incidents in Calgary, Canada (2017) bit.ly/2MLVdmp
Liked the hierarchies explaining soil degradation and possible strategies for restoring soil quality bit.ly/2MOl64V. Slightly branched, but not as much as the bifidobacterium family.
And I wondered why this thing took the steam out of my tiny figure every time I tried to move it bit.ly/2MWMJZP
Mean daily temperatures in five cities bit.ly/2wiJSkn (Source: World Meteorological Organization (WMO))
When you see something strange floating at the top of the sea bit.ly/2MQboyS (buoy), do you find this boring and move on, or do you look to see what's hidden below the water level to find its purpose and potentially how it works to generate electricity from ocean waves? Software all too often also hides things from us, but most of the time we have to be familiar with them if we want to make good decisions. Blurb-blurb.
If termites have started to dismantle your existing technology amzn.to/2P5IQz3, could this be a great time to seek some external help?
Indicating available amenities at hotels bit.ly/2MJFa8F
Teacher/non-teacher wage ratio in US states for selected years bit.ly/2MJe8hF. If I successfully convinced myself not to create this matrix, I would have missed the gradual "cooling" from left to right. 2012 illustrates this well: the wage ratio reached new lows, with teachers earning less and less compared to non-teachers. Haven't seen data for 2018, but it wouldn't surprise me if the status quo deepened its roots. No wonder why so many teachers are either missing or seeking to enter other professions (due to low wages, high stress, insufficient recognition...). Raises the question: Who will teach in the future?
Computing Jacobian and Hessian bit.ly/2NheQPZ. If you notice a mistake, please, feel free to correct me. For some reason Numpy initialization didn't work here (cannot convert to float), so I fell back to using regular Python lists, which had no problem accepting symbolic math.
Also made this small diagram depicting the water footprint for the production of selected foods bit.ly/2N9812X. Animal products (especially meats) seem to be particularly water-intensive (possibly not good for the environment). Finally my doubts got quantified.
"What's the most energy-efficient crop source for ethanol?" bit.ly/2MOfnMg. I was trying to answer a similar question for myself out of curiosity after seeing some very limited data how many kilograms of different crops are needed to produce thousand litres of ethanol and the area of land that such crops would require. Taking in account both, the index that appeared in front of me, placed maize at the first place (0.0041), followed by sugar beet (0.0089), sugarcrane (0.0296), rapeseed (0.0411) and wheat (0.0510) (lower is better). This article also placed sugar beet and sugar crane high and wheat at the bottom, so there seems to be some agreement. But I still find strange the practice to convert food to fuel.
Used a recent article in "Spiegel" to create some diagrams about the level of rents and purchase prices (€/m²) of condominiums in some city districts in Germany bit.ly/2NexrMS. Unless someone plans to stay in the same apartment for more than 10 years (120 months), renting seems to be the cheaper option, in all of these places. But the other day someone wanted to convince that in the long term "nothing beats ownership". Most people, who feel insecure about their job, probably prefer to have some more flexibility to move to a different location should the need arise.
"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast." - Leonardo da Vinci
Vincent van Gogh on raising ourselves above our art bit.ly/2OZzyo6. "Gauguin gives me courage to imagine and the things of the imagination do indeed take on more mysterious character." "The best paintings, like the best people, exhibit a certain imperfection as a confirmation of their distinctiveness and authenticity." "I would never do away with suffering; for it is often that which makes artists express themselves most vigorously." "Dont fear the storm, but fear the calm, treacherous, enchanted ground" (those unchallenged by risk and adventure become stagnant). He strived to achieve "genuine power of expression". "I go out at night to paint the stars" - from "The letters of Vincent van Gogh - A critical study"
"Algorithmic investigations almost always involve observing behavior, often at a fine level of detail" and "Styles in music are basically complex systems of probability relationships" - from "Mind, body, world". The mentioning of linear regression in combination with notes came as a shock to me.
Sources of carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin (in some foods) bit.ly/2MJC5Fz. Notes: Where a range of values was given for a particular food, the average has been used in the diagram. On the right many foods did not have values, but this does not necessarily mean that they do not contain zeaxanthin. The authors of the paper claimed that the leading cause of blindness in the world is vitamin A deficiency. I was surprised to learn that the body cannot synthesize carotenoids, but relies on our diet to obtain them. Towards the end, they recommended corn as a good source of lutein. After my previous analyses, you are probably not surprised to see parsley and basil here too.
Good to see FlightStats keeping track of cancellations and delays per geographic region for a period of up to a week bit.ly/2wfAxc8
Found some traffic hotspots in West Hollywood bit.ly/2BkSImt (Source: City of West Holywood Open Data, "Citywide Traffic Volumes", bit.ly/2nWgyeV) and then realized that the data is from the end of June 2017.
ICT development index 2017 bit.ly/2MGzH26 ↗. You may want to read the original publication to see what the index consists of and how it is calculated. Or read the second publication that gives a rank about how much it costs to make 30 phone calls and send 100 SMS messages in various countries (here my country did especially bad).
Does your city have a website, where all upcoming events are listed with their names and locations to stimulate broad participation and promote the creation of groups with common interests? Groups that then work together on innovative projects with uncertain outcome? Can such site exist for every city and be ad-free?
It would have been interesting to know which chemical substances contribute to which colors in a gem of given type (agate, beryl, amethyst etc.). Tried to seek information about this, but probably looked at the wrong place. Yet, at the same time, it is questionable whether such generalization is possible. Especially after seeing how many soil types exist and learning about their natural tendency to mix over time. Somehow I suspect that gems of the same type too may not be alike in their composition if we attempted to attribute minor perceptual differences to different element expositions. Whether spectroscopy could give conclusive results about this will likely remain an unknown to me. But it is clear that after seeing an encyclopedia of the gems, one cannot easily forget how beautiful they can be. What characterizes this beauty then?
About Mini cars bit.ly/2nRI0tT (fixing hyphenation was not the point here). Uses data from the Mini site, which has been transformed and stored in CSV format bit.ly/2BoMp11
Physical relocation has rarely been an issue for me. In most cases what mattered more were company profile (whether the corporate goal matched my interests), internal culture (prevalent behaviors and depth of relationships), learning intensity (not purely assured in words), ability to do more meaningful work within an interdisciplinary team, good compensation (to mitigate relocation inconvenience & loss of connections, rent requirements, living costs, cost of learning materials). Never found a distant company that I felt was a good fit and correspondingly lost interest in relocation. Better to avoid the risks I dislike.
To be fair, I assumed that speech recognition was something that became possible only in the more recent times, with the advances in machine learning. You can imagine my surprise after seeing this chip bit.ly/2BoCwAJ in a magazine issue from 1988. Remembered the quote that "Everything new is the well-forgotten old".
Number of fatalities involving large aeroplane passenger and cargo operations worldwide, 1970-2017 bit.ly/2nKAYXY (Source: European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), "Annual Safety Report 2018"). Good to see that safety in air operations seems to be improving overall. Also saw some beautiful, colorful balloons and then the warning that a key risk area with them are the landings. Who would have thought that the beautiful could be dangerous?
SNR and current consumption by different clock frequencies for the IM69D120 XENSIV MEMS microphone by Infineon bit.ly/2Bnvjk9
Don't you think that it is better to discharge capacitors completely (if possible) before a system is considered in an off state? Shouldn't that be its natural, default attribute? Someone opening the case to attempt a repair could be in for an unpleasant surprise, which does not feel like a good design. If a machine shuts down, but leaves a backdoor for someone else to start it remotely, how good is that? Clean startup, clean shutdown, please.
Came to an interesting comparison between complex and complicated bit.ly/2wcPdc0, but for some reason it doesn't fully resonate with me. I believe that complex is reducible too. So how would I differentiate between the two then? To me something is complicated when it achieves a goal indirectly, following one or more unnecessary steps along the way. A form of inefficiency/waste. Complex is something that consists of a broad variety of submodules, which have different responsibilites that combine together to create some unique functionality. Lots of communication/interaction between the modules may be involved with many pieces changing state in parallel. Most people cannot easily understand how such systems work. High complexity is not desirable, since it increases the likelihood of errors and system failure. To make systems more robust, we often attempt to reduce their complexity (the number of moving parts), while keeping only what is absolutely necessary (nothing complicated). Minimalism.
You can also see the pharmacy locations in the capital of the USA bit.ly/2wcHbjm
Street lights by type and wattage in Washington D.C. bit.ly/2waXFZm (Source: DC.gov, "Street lights", bit.ly/2webq9l). The green color dominates, which means that a large percentage of the 70256 streets lights must be of the high-pressure sodium type. Their total wattage sums to 16.8345TW, so that the average per light comes at 239.62W.
"A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving and there is always the possibility of surprise" - Bill Burnett & Dave Evans in "Designing your life"
An attempt to compare the cost of living in six cities bit.ly/2wbKqHM according to Numbeo (55 price points for each city). The reported data may not have been the most accurate, so be sceptical about the accuracy of the end result as well. Another minus is that the prices in Copenhagen and Oslo had to be converted to Euro, which has likely distorted the results further. To be fair, I expected Vienna to be much more expensive, but in the data it appears almost at the same level as Frankfurt (whereas Cologne appears to have a slight advantage over both).
Wouldn't come to the idea to use the 0.3333 rational (with progressively shrinking font size from viewer to horizon) as if the sun was saying "zzzz" before sunset. Strange thinking, but at least it makes me smile.
Hexagonal grid with images bit.ly/2MXjGBQ
Rivers longer than 4500km bit.ly/2MWp0Wm
Decided to learn more about meat consumption levels (1990-2018) bit.ly/2nJq4li (Source: OECD Data). Beef and poultry lead the ranks. 100-150g meat per person and day seems equivalent to each person killing a 1kg chicken approx. every week. Unclear only how fast we could raise one by ourselves if we had to follow good practices. Would this period be shorter than a week?
Trees in Mississauga, Canada bit.ly/2nPlvpP. Realized that I already had this bit.ly/2oWkRXG, but the new perspective seems slightly less distorted. There is an empty space at the North, which must be the Toronto Pearson International Airport.
The reason I don't want to know your name, age and nationality and also don't like to be asked about them is simple: discrimination. Many studies have proven that it is everywhere, even inside companies who claim they don't discriminate. Treating different employees differently is an entire business, which is a practice I cannot accept. I prefer to base my relationships on helpful service and professionalism (whatever it means) rather than on biases, assumptions or perceptions about who must have the upper hand. Its your own right to be willing to exert power, but then do not expect me to be willing to serve you.
One problem with texts that were generated by means different from human thinking is that they can become prevalent on the web, if we are not careful. Imagine someone seeking a way to degrade people's thinking to a common level, so that noone could think about anything different, innovative or exceptional. What would they do? Litter the web with nonsense and misinformation. Perhaps one of the more immediate dangers about the future of the web. And it helps to stay alert about not losing the last known good state.
"We need it for tomorrow" rarely works with me. You could have approached me a month in advance to get a feeling how working with me looks like, but you chose to avoid this and wait for the last moment, believing that necessity gives you the right to give orders to a stranger. Well, it doesn't. And I wouldn't bend under your influence.
One of the things that I think has helped me to keep a good finished-to-failed ratio is the idea behind the quote "If you expect it to fail, don't start it" (or its variation "(Be sure that you can) Finish what you start"). Usually one of the first things I check about client projects which come from an unknown environment. If I feel at the boundary of hesitating, I would refuse to accept the project, each and every time.
Working directly with clients on their websites means that your work can touch almost any industry, which is a fairly unique opportunity to learn a lot about people's needs and their perceptions about added value. This in turn makes you a better designer.
When is the right time to start adding contingencies for the resources you are using? Do you look at five, fifteen, thirty minute averages, daily averages or something else? What is the threshold that must be exceeded to actually implement the change? Will keeping the current utilization harm your work, when it is suboptimal, but avoids a cost that is too high?
How long is the delay between the request you receive and the response you give? Do you have a mechanism in place, which measures this? What are the service times of other companies in your industry? Can you streamline your processes to respond faster?
Do you think that a website can be useful to a vegetable producer? Imagine their production bought at a much lower price than the market rate simply because the buyers are willing to push the price to the bottom to extract higher profit on their backs. Can a website circumvent these individuals, giving producers with no physical stores access to a broader client base, so that the price is determined by market principles instead?
Wondering whether most art galleries have their own pages or prefer to be present on Facebook/Instagram instead. Not sure that anything can beat the flexibility of a dedicated site. And not just for art, but in general.
Seeking Toyota cars with favorable MPG, horse power, rpm and price bit.ly/2MV4hSQ. The matrix of correlations bit.ly/2nF3YAu highlights the expected relationship between horse power and rpm, but also hints about a slightly weaker relationship between horse power and price—something which may not be immediately obvious.
Calculating shipping cost as percentage of the total cost of online shopping bit.ly/2w6XnTh
Using a graph as a means to find the node, most vulnerable to failure, within the system's network, is another great example.
"In 2015, Denmark broke the world wind power production record and achieved around 14TWh, providing 42.1% of the Danish gross electricity consumption." Terawhat? Curious to know the current state.
Implementing an equation about radar received power to get a feeling for it bit.ly/2nDUqWj
"A few grams of soil contain billions of bacteria, hundreds of kilometers of fungal hyphae, tens of thousands of protozoa, thousands of nematodes, several hundred insects, arachnids and worms and hundreds of meters of plant roots." Not sure how this is even possible, but assuming that nature knows its material well. Yet, erosion (from water, wind, ice, gravity), salinisation (accumulation of soluble salts like sodium, magnesium, calcium), compaction (heavy agricultural technology), sealing ("infrastructure over soil", e.g. roads, pavements, buildings) and others often stay on the path of this important work. Especially considering that forming centimeters of fertile topsoil is said to take several hundred years. Didn't knew which element is encouraging what: 1) nitrogen - leafy growth, 2) phosphorus - root development, 3) potassium - fruit and flower production. Assumed that highly alkaline soil would be better, but the publication claimed that a pH 6.5-7 (very slightly on the acidic side) is preferable for most plants (you may want to test that). Especially liked to idea of adding the dust from the vacuum cleaner into the compost pile, allowing clearning to serve double purpose.
How is the heat dissipated off the device? How does its distribution on the surface look like? How can this distribution become more uniform?
Usually quite fast at uncovering the Luxus pages on websites bit.ly/2KWKKzC. Thought I win a choco egg with a small reward inside. But the idea that missing pages can be advertised as "limited edition" is hardly digestible. I was also looking for "this", not "else", so the search below looked strange too.
Strange that the constantly improving crash-readiness was said to be insufficient to compensate for the increased number of cars when it came to the reduction in the number of tragic incidents on the road. Wondered about a possible explanation. Perhaps more cars complexify the events on the road and the opportunities to crash increase, despite the cars getting safer overall. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that the number of fatalities per 100 thousand inhabitants is almost twice as high in China and India compared to Europe. If the infrastructure of more populous countries is burdened more heavily, this could be a contributing factor. Raises the question when (utilization level) it must expand/improve in order to effectively reduce this number.
Hard to do simple and expensive to be cheap, especially when you save on cable insulation quality, leaving an airplane susceptible to a short circuit and eventual system failure. Want to be a passenger on that one?
Can a different arrangement of the seats influence how many visitors come to your place? A different interior decoration? A more friendly attitude?
Believing that you don't need domain knowledge as a programmer, just because your client will be able to provide it when needed, is a fallacy. Once you take on the project and they start discussing things like the difference between pneumatics and hydrailics (or something else), you may feel ovewhelmed with the stream of knowledge you are suddenly exposed to. This is what spending your entire time on reading/writing code does for you—it makes you completely insensitive to anything else. Therefore, leave your editor for a while and start seeing the world more broadly for what it is rather than how you'd like to be perceived. Keep looking for ways to better understand your clients, role and impact. Seek new roles that expand your worldview, identify opportunities and connections with what you already know. But this may require to become more familiar with other domains, which in itself is painful, once again.
Developing an app must be worth it. If you will get 50 users paying one dollar each, the cost has likely exceeded the benefit. Which is why I prefer to secure the payment upfront rather than rely on wishful thinking. The paying client verifies that such problem truly exists, saving one from the need to hope so. The market size for this problem is also important. It could be very small to justify an app released to the public.
Just (i/o)n time.
The screen can have a ten-inch diagonal, but will it still fit well in the hand?
What is the most characteristic parameter about this environment? Imagine your bathroom doesn't have windows and you want to turn on the ventilation only when someone is inside. What kind of sensor could you use? One option would be an infrared sensor for motion detection. But once the person stops moving, the device can temporarily switch itself on and off and the sound it makes in the process can play on your nerves. This means we rely on something that is not always there. Yet, an infrared detector could possibly be used to log when someone went inside and outside, thus giving an approximate idea what percentage of the total occupant time was spent in a given room (saw a paper with infrared sensor installations used for this task). For the ventilation, we could also think about having a pressure-aware sensor below the faience tiles. While this may work, it is not optimal too. We may need a sensor per tile, which is a costly decision, especially when the bathroom area is bigger. And now we come to the first question, realizing that this is the only room where light is turned on when someone enters—each and every time. So a light detector used to control the ventilation seems reasonable.
Are you aware of the parameters about the life of your production machines? This might give you data to optimize their operation. When are they loudest, most vibrating, hottest, most consuming (power)? Under which conditions do they wear out fastest? Many years ago I was in a boiler-producing factory and the sound there was unbearable. Noone even thought for a moment about the noise levels and some workers felt too proud to wear ear protection. The way the machines operate is still important for the health of the workers.
Why collect user data when you can never be sure about its truthiness? What about collecting more than that (hiding this from the user) to separate truth from a lie? Can such platforms instill credibility when anyone could post an image from their trip to the moon? Fully reflects how, when and for whom I develop applications.
Smart packaging: if you leave it open for more than 15sec, it closes itself to preserve the item fresh. The dry bread problem.
Mini optimization for sites using lots of videos: when a previously started video goes outside of view, temporarily pause it and resume only after the user returns to it. Otherwise resources may be needlessly wasted in the background.
Estimating cycle time based on the cyclist velocity, wind velocity, and a sample energy source bit.ly/2McewWd. The main idea here is to think of the body as a battery and see how long it would take to deplete the energy stored in it through a sample food source (in this case a large chocolate bar). Makes no claims about accuracy. If you notice a mistake, feel free to correct me.
"They do not lose their honor if they refuse to board an unsafe vehicle." - Robert Elliott Allinson in "On the very idea of risk management: Lessons from the space shuttle Challenger". Good read.
As long as you feed someone else's platform with your hard work, they'll enjoy it and you'll stay hungry.
Coral, microscope, photo. Stunning.
Hotels on Times Square, New York bit.ly/2KLKP90
Used Wikipedia bit.ly/2KR3LDy ↗ to look for outliers among chemical elements bit.ly/2OvaODY according the the properties group, period, atomic weight, density, melt, boil, heat capacity, electronegativity and abundance. Nitrogen, hydrogen and magnesium stand out. I wondered what happened with oxygen, but it is seen on the third diagram. Boron, beryllium and especially vanadium come surprising to me as I never heard of potential usage scenarios. But most other elements with visible labels are already used in one form or another.
Common wheat and spelt production by country in the EU in 2016 (according to Eurostat) bit.ly/2MaowiJ
Deserts by location and area (log scale) bit.ly/2KKaX4e. Interesting clusters and a fictive diagonal line.
First time seeing a watch with the dates ordered in circle, using two tiny colored lines to surround the current date bit.ly/2Mam9Nb ↗. Beautiful, precise UI design. Seems intuitive too, since by moving from outside to inside, a viewer examines the time at decreasing level of granularity. Do you find that the minute ticks slightly interfere with the date indicators?
Good reminder: If something seems surprisingly cheap, there is a good chance that someone has been made to suffer for it. Is this what we want to support (short and long term)?
Using details from Trek bikes, I wrote a short snippet checking the suitable bike frame size for a cyclist with known height bit.ly/2Oqpzbi. However, this is to be used as orientation only and not as a substitute for speaking with a specialist at the local bike store.
Comparing Jaguar cars bit.ly/2KGYONf
Latest issue of Max Planck research magazine claims that we burden the environment with ≈380 million tons of plastic each year (footprint). A major advantage of plastics, they say, is their longevity (often desirable or requirement). Led me to a strange secondary thought about an unfolding long-term autogoal, but this is possibly something reversible.
If you want me to work on your project, feel free to send me your proposal.
Chocolate nutrient comparison bit.ly/2KHx6Ac
"The model is not the reality and one should not distort reality to fit the model." Very well said.
Botanic Gardens Conservation International: "We found 480 matches" (of endangered plant species). But when one sees a high variety of beautiful plants in a botanic garden, they may not immediately think about missing species. Everything looks perfect, because someone took great care in organizing the existing area so that nothing seems to be missing. This means that in high variety it is easy to miss uniqueness or easy to assume that everything is there. Interesting whether a large company with many employees can allow itself to become negligent with newcomers just because they believe they have seen it all.
Restaurants by seat capacity in Durham, North Carolina bit.ly/2M4HjMB
Highways in Durham, North Carolina bit.ly/2MbsM1y
UV index readings and protective measures bit.ly/2MaNDSy
Didn't like the tone of voice on the AccuWeather website bit.ly/2KImQHN. No to both options and your site. Greetings to your partners too.
Weight vs. pulse for some animals bit.ly/2KEzOGp
Reading behind the lines: "We also want the best possible exit for you, baby. Sell yourself cheap and come in our family." bit.ly/2Om28zG. Further: "Constantly articulate why a company should buy you." To lose focus or to give a giant fund a reason to disguise as a company?
Parking place utilization in Cork, Ireland bit.ly/2OhTPou
Number of deaths from drug overdose by US state (01.2015 - 12.2017) bit.ly/2nrt8CF. Please, note that the data for 2017 has been indicated as underreported and incomplete, but still has been considered here. During the period, six states had consistently over 100 thousand deaths per month, which is a lot. Looking where the zero is, it seems that no state has been left untouched.
Interesting analysis on pizza dollar slices in New York bit.ly/2LYLdXe ↗. That one needs to sell 1600 slices/day to remain viable seems to go slightly too far. "98% of dollar slices are within 10 minute walk of a subway entrance". I was often suprised how bad eating decisions can become once people decide spontaneously on the go.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Early stage entrepreneurial activity as percentage of entrepreneurial activity (by country, 2017) bit.ly/2LXRaUk and total early stage entrepreneurial activity by age group bit.ly/2ni3sZ3. Seems that entrepreneurship knows no age.
Fuel sales by EU member state and fuel type in 2016 bit.ly/2OgoBhv. Diesel was preferred in most countries; only in Greece and Cyprus petrol was more popular. Between 2004 and 2016, the total petrol sales decreased by almost 52.8%, while the total diesel sales increased by 20%.
"Smart homes know what you're doing and adjust themselves accordingly." This is one of the more useful definitions I have seen. But such automated controls require, at least temporarily, (human) controllers.
If you offer hotel rooms, do you have an interface indicating which ones are currently occupied? Can a traveler select and reserve their room by that interface prior to arrival? Or are rooms given on "as needed" basis without considering individual preferences? Wondering only.
The 2018 top programming languages bit.ly/2LYuzaj. Great to see that my two favourites are already at first and second position. In addition, I used 6 and 8 too, but over time they introduced decisions that decreased their popularity.
Rail network length in some countries (2016) bit.ly/2OgPYs3. Learned something new once again.
It would have been nice if after creating a potential convex hull in 3D, I could go "inside" the shape to observe the boundaries from there (not seeing "crossing" foreground & background lines). In my case I was not able to find a way with Axes3D.
Have you solved problems of the type "Minimize (function) subject to (list of constraints)"? I realized that CVXPY makes this convenient and beautiful at the same time bit.ly/2neNFKy. In cases when the objective function is more complex, you may need to read more about the DCP ruleset.
Die Bundesregierung gab bekannt, dass es in 2016 der Verpackungsabfall mit 220.5kg pro Kopf ausfiel. Jeder kann für sich selbst ausrechnen, wieviel mal dies das eigene Gewicht übersteigt.
Demonstrating a logic simplifier bit.ly/2Kr0mLb. Seems to be the type of code that can be used to optimize code, reducing the number of logic operations to a minimum. If we are not careful, logic can easily grow, become complex and easily lead to bugs, which is why it is nice to see a tool like this.
Simple code to test three points for collinearity bit.ly/2n9JOOG
Three lines to validate the value of a sample integral bit.ly/2Oe7zAv
Correlations among the sales numbers of different car makers for Europe (01.2015 - 05.2018) bit.ly/2Krp9yY. According to this data, Bentley and Mini tend to often sell together while the sales of Chevrolet and Lada deviate the most in different directions. There may be some reasons behind these results, so it would be interesting to look for the whys.
Wondering why noone built an oven, whose front cover has an integrated TV. Could save a lot of space and every time when someone watches a football game, they wouldn't need to "go to the kitchen" out of fear of having burned something, because they could smell the state in front of them. Bonus would be a "transparent mode" button to get a quick inside—in OLED quality—and a "desmell" button to run an internal absorber so that guests can feel comfortable, not having to fear to be surrounded by outside cats/dogs in the late hours.
"Everything takes twice as long as you initially planned for." Also valid for seven-year-long restrictions, some of which end in 2020.
Didn't know that the owner of Booking.com, Kayak and Priceline (three popular travel sites) is one and the same person. But under multiple brands this is easy to hide. People might think that they have choice, but someone found a way to simulate it. I think we are not too far away from the time when it will be a basic requirement that on every door on every "Lidl" store will also be written: "by the owner of Kaufland" and on every "Kaufland" store "by the owner of Lidl". On every "Blue Origin" vehicle and "WholeFoods" store could be written "by the owner of Amazon" and so on. People have the right to know where their money is going and who gets access to their data. Otherwise, thank you, no trust in anyone. Hopefully someone will escalate this to a law.
Kernel density estimation of two channels of an image bit.ly/2O85s1q (Image source: bit.ly/2ObHvGs, downsized to 400 x 225 pixels). Still took a lot of time, otherwise I would have done the same with all channel combinations.
Spring flower bit.ly/2OavVet. The circles have equal radius, even of it may not look so. Hopefully you like the overlap effect.
10-day weather forecast by hour for three cities (04-16.08.2018) bit.ly/2O6zvqg. Nice to observe periodicity, with each spike resembling the highest temperature in that day. From this, we can infer that the biggest temperature differences between the three cities London, Frankfurt and Vienna are expected to be between the 8th and 10th of August.
Wondering whether it is possible to tell an algorithm which electronic components need to be connected and how and let it automatically determine the minimal feasible path lengths, which minimize the number of intersections on the printed circuit board.
BBC Weather has a nice widget showing the ten-day weather forecast (here I selected Helsinki) bit.ly/2Oa1eX7. Beautiful icons, detail and great space-efficiency. The only things I would change would be removing the horizontal scrollbars and setting a dash between the min and max temperatures (currently on multiple lines) on a single line to support the intuition about an interval. If inside the hourly view all hours always end with "00", then this could be noise, where the letter "h" would suffice (but due to the fact that hours of the day are so common and easily recognizable as a sequence, may be omitted entirely). If I were to look from a distance, the bottom icons would all appear very similar. But vectors with known magnitude and direction can be made to appear more distinctive. It appears somewhat strange to center the wind speed inside a circle at the starting point of the vector when this number relates to the entire vector length.
Having me in Germany has never been an issue. Studied there, learned German for almost 10 years, but still left many years ago. Couldn't find the opportunities and the respect I was looking for. Damals war mir die Miete zu hoch, die Bezahlung—zu niedrig. The decision to leave came therefore naturally. Nowadays, my skills are only selectively available to German companies and I no longer have the inclination/desire to sell them cheaply.
Finishing precisely at 18:00 has never been my goal. On the contrary—I found that my intentions usually spiked at the end of the day when I had the most ideas and the least amount of time to realize them.
Offering "competitive salary" is how many companies disqualify themselves. "Competitive" means mediocre or non-existent. This non-binding statement is nothing else than an attempt to play. Only employees who do the actual work know how much this costs them and whether that salary not only covers their costs, but also allows them to grow and further their carreer. Therefore, the attempt to speak with the voice of the employees seems manipulative. Sufficient reason for candidates not to apply and for job sites not to accept such job offers.
If you saw image spacers and found them useless, wait to see the book spacers.
Council houses by ward in Leeds, starting from 2009 bit.ly/2O43zCE. Shown are the three top wards and three with relatively high variability of the housing numbers.
Smartphone shipments (in millions) for 2017/2018 bit.ly/2KpGHeU. Huawei seems to have expanded the most, while "Others" have shipped fewer devices.
Indication of a process step bit.ly/2MdNwlu
If the system is not lying and my interpretation is correct, transitioning from a C2 to a C1 state takes 57 microseconds on a SU2700. Not easily perceivable, but fascinated that it can be measured.
Raining cats and dogs. And the lack of stormwater inlets quickly flooded the streets to the point that even busses can barely move. Update as of 15:00: The situation is much calmer now, only the grey clouds remain.
The rain gauges in Montreal look very intentionally positioned bit.ly/2n29wo4, much better than random. Sensing the influence of an algorithm here. Usually what I like to see.
Why not fill the entire screen with social icons? bit.ly/2mYqjbE. You do not have to adopt bad design on your site as well. Needless to say, all these services are not supported here.
Using strokes to create a colorful square bit.ly/2KfFQgB. The "hsv" palette looked very nice (try it), but was too colorful for my taste.
To reduce the iikelihood of destructive floods, the city of Tampa, Florida has installed stormwater inlets. You can see their density throughout the city bit.ly/2mXp9gH
Points of interest by type in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2mZnabW. The top five types are retail, medical, public places, education and industrial.
Bloomberg is using the extremely long article trick with ads placed inbetween to make them less noticeable (but the article itself highly profitable). Machine brought to a halt from all the flashing. Such behavior has become the primary reason why the web is headed towards becoming useless. Should concern every company at every level that publishes content online. Understand that your ability to push more is limited not by how much you can produce, but by how much your client finds reasonable to have access to in a given amount of time. Exceeding this time without even asking could be bad for your business. I hope that performance won't become a hard requirement similarly to the permission to use personal data, because it will once again badly affect the usability on many websites.
Sometimes the reasons for traffic delay may not be known in advance to a traveler. It could be due to congestion, vehicle crash, closed streets, problems with the air conditioner, flood, thunder or something else. A simple icon on the schedule could be more informative than nothing. The worst thing to do is to keep people in the dark about what is happening and why. And periodically inform them that there will be more delay to the delay.
Another nice-to-have (I think) would be an interface that shows people which flower types are available at each flower store on any day in a given city. This way people will know when to walk in to obtain their favourites, freeing more time to the florists to enjoy what they do best.
It may seem that clicking on an external link is the ideal time to inform the user that they are leaving, adding a personal touch bit.ly/2M8uPj7, but this can stand in the way of browsing and slows down the user unnecessarily (and repeatedly for all links). Also, the mentioning of the word "tracking" is slightly disturbing.
Any two or more different points of view (client, designer, clients of the client) can be unified by the look for the centroid. Describes the beneficial point of view to have. Geometry for everyone.
Glare screens add so much strain on the eyes. Screens free of reflections should be the norm, yet they aren't. And if it's not the screen, it will be the bezel or the stand. I have enough of that.
Cheap can get expensive. I wouldn't look further than estimating the total cost of ownership to validate this.
Reailzed that in many hospitals one has to wait on information to find out which type of specialist can be found in which room, on which floor and when (time). A designer would instead create floor plans with the right labels and possibly make this accessible as an app on every mobile phone. Asking ourselves "Why did this question arise at the first place?" may uncover minor inconveniences accumulating over time. Maybe even hospitals need the help of a designer once in a while.
At some point, you might start believing that adding more resources to an existing system makes it exist.
If only the fetching of the main page takes more than a second, how could further actions like parsing, error interpretation, individual resource fetching from a CDN, DOM building, styling, JS execution, large image decoding/rendering/painting and any popups (advertisements, general cookie collection information, GDPR acceptance, location sharing), all together, stay below this threshold on a slow machine? Impossible. Used the time wget to /dev/null idea on some popular sites, but the findings were bitter.
Strange how lettering and numbering can also become a design choice once we consider the entire palette of Intel processors. For instance, in terms of features I learned that 5200U can be very similar to 6006U. The first is said to be slightly better performing (being from the fifth generation), while the second is less powerful (006 < 200), but from a newer (sixth) generation, meaning that it has a slightly better-performing integrated graphics. And yet, 7100U has an even better integrated graphics than 6006U. The U means that they all are ultra-low power—like my current laptop CPU. Yet, does the CPU model 5Y71 speak to you as if it could be even more power-efficient than an U model? Maybe not necessarily (but it is said to be). What could this strange letter Y stand for? The fact that this processor is more recent and so efficient makes it look like a great addition to new machines, "accelerating" their price-related letters accordingly. Which brings me to a point to consider performance < performance per watt < performance per watt-dolar if possible.
Does it break when it falls, melt upon heating, explode under load, short-circuit after liquid spill, slow down to avoid too fast, spoil without attention, break before the expiration of the product's useful lifetime? Does it speak for itself?
Is this app animated to "cool" someone?
Not every platform justifies the time spent on it.
How does it feel in the hand/on touch? Does it fit well? How does it feel when used?
I often prefer to work on the inernals of the package rather than the beautiful wrapping. The latter can be misleading or set the wrong expectations. Also: beautiful wrapping with no content inside is equivalent to cheating.
Repetition is often avoidable if we take the time to reread what we've written bit.ly/2Lx8Qpr. Code can also be duplicated if not carefully structured. This is why each piece of functionality needs to have its right place where someone would look after it first.
Used to test with lots of browsers, but then realized that the problem to be understood and solved is much more important than any cosmetic differences my code might introduce. However, if a test revealed very different results, then this served as early indication that something in my thought process was flawed—invaluable to know.
Saw a mini weather station in a small brochure and thought a second about why I liked its design. It has a screen of moderate size wrapped in smooth plastic having a small logo, shows the current time, the inside and the outside temperature (may have other modes as well). And it costs 3.5€. Yesterday when I looked only for temperature sensors I found a cheap one from STMicroelectronics (but it also measures humidity) for 2.9€ (some other sensors can cost as low as 0.8€ in a single sample). And I wondered whether this device had two parts (only one was shown) with one sensor each. Electronic displays can be relatively costly—units I saw started from 2.5 - 3€ and were not of the type one would be willing to observe for long. There is plastic material that also needs to be shaped appropriately, likely a mini PCB, a battery, some logic to determine how to translate sensor voltages into temperature, another one to determine which pieces of the digits to toggle and so on. You probably already feel which question will come. How is is even possible to add so much value into such a low-cost product? Is this only the result of economies of scale (when thousands of units get produced, their price drops) or is there something more to it? Which is why I never stopped to be excited about engineering/design/programming. Always make it simpler and better.
By choosing to work with me, you also increase the likelihood that I will be able to do more (hopefully meaningful) work in the future. Remember what Walt Disney said.
If you didn't follow my previous words on the SSD, you might have noticed that an NVMe device like Samsung EVO 960 has much faster transfer rates bit.ly/2JYCGO1, provided your machine has the right expansion slot. It is also ≈40% lighter, meaning that a laptop could lose additional 35g of weight. For me this makes no difference, since I don't have such slot and will continue to live with my HDD for now. But that Amazon has lowered the prices to 118$/170$ for the SSD/NVMe version (both 500GB) might be a sign that the previously available wide gap in the prices of these two technologies has started to shrink.
If you are looking for a room in a big city with plenty of options, you could attempt to reduce the guesswork by running some code to obtain a short list of rooms with desirable characteristics, such as good price, area and location. This seems much better over the alternative to manually scroll and click on countless page-related buttons to view information that may not be relevant to you. Unfortunately, not all websites make this easy enough. Understandable, since otherwise clones would have appeared.
I don't offer packages that say this costs that much. Everything depends on your project and custom requirements. If it is something that anyone else could deliver, I am not interested.
Global horizontal irradiation by month and hour in various cities (Wh/m2) bit.ly/2JZ3kXb. The data is from 2009, yet some is still better than none.
Total individuals in shelter in New York bit.ly/2mGOcEK. Notice that this says nothing about the number of unsheltered individuals. It can be even higher in many cities as this quick diagram shows bit.ly/2mJ1MY8 (uses data from various homeless counts reports). But in New York, the number of sheltered individuals is much bigger, which might indicate that the city does a lot to prevent homeless people from living on the streets. A couple of days ago I saw an article about the increasing number of homeless people in Vancouver. Currently they have 2100 unsheltered individuals—an increase of 30% in the last 3 years. And if you saw my previous demo on shelter availability in Toronto, you probably wondered how in almost 80 shelters there were only few places available. Also, not only the number of people in shelters increase, but the average duration of their stay there, which is troubling. I think that all this illustrates the dimension of the problem quite well.
Compare chia, quinoa, amaranth and millet bit.ly/2LGh79U. The values are meant for 100g of product.
Burger nutrient comparison bit.ly/2JURdu9. This means that to reach the recommended min daily fiber intake of 30g only from burgers, one would have to eat ≈10, of the most fiber-rich type (based on the data here). But as you can imagine, this will be connected with too many calories.
If you saw the label "Not secure" in the adress bar while on this website, you have probably updated your browser to the latest version (like me). I am fine with this, but you may not be. If absolute security is truly important to you, consider not filling any forms here in the future or not visiting at all. This way you will have nothing to fear about. Thank you.
Maximum estimated numbers of living species (sqrt scale) bit.ly/2JTjP73
Didn't know that the fastest swimming fish (sailfish) is only about 25% slower than the fastest running animal (cheetah). Their speeds can reach 22m/s and 30m/s.
At the end of a film projection in a cinema, are the lights turned on abruptly, with much greater levels of luminous flux reaching your eye compared to the flux coming from the big screen while in the dark? Or is there a more gradual adjustment, leading to comparable before/after flux levels based on the current position of the viewer? Curious whether this gets measured.
Simple code checking the validity of the binomial theorem bit.ly/2LBqIPa
"A combinatorial miscellany" contains a beautiful visual explanation of the divisors of 60 bit.ly/2JPX9EU
Packing as many items on unit space might seem efficient at first bit.ly/2mECUAT, but only until the viewer realizes that they can't focus on anything due to the noise. Big supermarket chains may end losing clients when they start saving on designer employment.
Visualization of the tweet times of a sample user bit.ly/2JN7nFP (not all tweets; according to Twitter). We see at least three longer streaks when this user was not very active (look for relatively wide horizontal spacing between the points), which were interestingly followed by short bursts of activity (look for many points appearing almost on a vertical). Do you think that other people could also follow a "compensatory" approach or is this more a result of an unconscious behavior? Now you see why it is always a good idea to have time attached to each tweet/bit we write.
Learning about the cost of living index in various countries bit.ly/2JRG5OD (click to zoom)
Computing with a distance matrix bit.ly/2JLM9Z7
There isn't much I can give to non-payers except an apology. They can "pay" someone else to do the job.
The best companies tend to retain their programmers over time. Not lose them and then seek them.
For very similar reasons stopped attempting the same on Fluke multimeters two days ago. One feature was available, one not, ad infinitum. It became tiring to track which is which and how to deal with that. Today we have so much data to the point of our own self-defeat. Things that should have been simple appear as if a team of writers/programmers provided content/information/code to another team to digest it, not to an individual.
Started working on an idea I had about exploring the specifications of all Brother laser printers, but then noticed that I made a mistake bit.ly/2LlCUog. Does not surprise me considering that I have tried to capture 31 features per device. Sadly, correcting further omissions/mistakes would be time-prohibitive, so I'll stop here. But the company provides information even on noise and power consumption. On an old printer I noticed a usage pattern of 7W in standby and around 600W in printing mode, while one of the Brother models with many positive reviews had 0.6W/410W. Especially nice to see the 1.46x improvement at the upper end (where it is most noticeable) and the 11.66x improvement at the lower end (where the device spends most of the time). My intuition is that speed can also be an important factor in overall energy usage, because a fast printer using lots of energy may be equivalent to a slow one using much less.
The system didn't expect a human being at the other end bit.ly/2LEdBK8 (language ambiguity)
"So you buy them for the blades, not for the handles", I concluded. But how many blades does this thing have? One? "Two" This means you get 10 handles x 2 blades = 20 blades in total, while someone buying the 3 handles x 3 blades (Mach3) would have 9 blades at 2x the price. "Exactly". We both laughed. Always know why your customer prefers your brand.
Brain: "Could you please determine the cost of each cookie type in the mixed bag? I'm inerested in the relative price difference between the one with the jam and the one with the half-inch of chocolate at the bottom." No. Due to your refusal to ask more interesting questions, you won't get anything today.
You turn on the TV, but the picture is unclear, having too much noise—intolerable. How much would a 10% improvement in picture quality be worth to you? If not that much, you could ask yourself for all divisible-by-ten percentages up to 100%. Perhaps the curve you will get this way won't be linear. In order words, the joy of having a perfect picture can come at a cost that is too high. For some people, cable TV is synonymous to that perfect picture. They can select and enjoy a large variety of channels and exactly the ones they like whenever they like them. Yet, at the same time they may complain of having to pay around 100$/month for this privilege. This may not seem too much at first, but eventually over time it adds up. Which may be one reason why some of them have decided to cancel their cable TV subscriptions, realizing that a good antenna can give them a reasonable quality signal at a one-time cost instead of having to pay recurring, long-term fees. And even when the plan is hypothetically 30$/month, the investment in an expensive 80$ antenna (if it works as expected) may pay off in less than 3 months. A very small period if one could live with a smaller selection of programs and eventually some noise. And if one watches primarily to know approximately what happens (degree of certainty if you will) rather than to be aware of every small detail. But this requires installment, tinkering, location and orientation adjustment, performance tests... many will find it much easier to continue watching with zero risk on missing anything.
On a "good" multimeter you are said to able to get 4 updates/sec of the value you see on the screen. Strange to see this coming from an environment having a requirement of 60fps/sec for animation. But what if a device cannot refresh the display once a value is measured? Will this mean that someone has to set & remove the probes 60 times per second to obtain a somewhat accurate result? Change could be on its way...
Average bytes per pixel for a directory of images bit.ly/2JLotUG. This ratio looks good.
Eyes on the prize.
Selective blur of image fragments bit.ly/2JHNosi using code only (no Photoshop). The combined image was compressed at the end.
Having a project you want me to work on? Thinking that the conditions might satisfy someone like me? Then get in contact and we'll see.
Quantifying the cost of distraction (idea) bit.ly/2LwJLab
Gradient in circle bit.ly/2uPEZO3
Can't even imagine what it is like to use a slow website on a mobile phone when I see poor-quality websites increasingly blocking my machine. When everyone is rushing to push things online, this is what happens.
If I could I would send some of our currently pouring rain to Sweden, where currently 40 different fires are spreading, according to Zeit.
Learning about packaged salads bit.ly/2mv4ZKU. A minor inconvenience while creating this appeared in the form of loss of focus. Every time I clicked on inspect element and switched to my editor to copy a small JavaScript code and paste it in the console, focus returned to Chrome (effectively hiding my editor) to show which element was inspected (I just wanted to open the console). Perhaps using F12 would have been better, but sometimes you find this after you have finished.
Speaking of visual explanations, "Draw to win" might be interesting.
Something small I had trouble understanding in C++ code for a long time was related to memory addresses and the effect of writing to an address belonging to a device. I am still mostly clueless, but saw a useful, "lumped" description. Someone drew a single big address space and then enclosed address ranges for the RAM, the ROM, the I/O device registers etc, with some "dead zones" inbetween. Single address space for all of them—a convenient form of abstraction. The address ranges can be hardware-dependent, but the access scheme remains the same. So grateful to see someone sharing this. Now tell me that visual explanations don't matter.
I admit that I never thought about AI and machine learning in terms of one being superset of the other. Buth their limitations looked suspiciously similar to me.
Website interactivity may not solve all possible issues; it may even create more than it solves.
Thought of creating something simple with colorful stripes describing a sequence of serials running on different TV channels in parallel (TV guide), but then saw that someone else was faster than me on that one as well.
After the costs of a big, failing project become clear, the cost of an expensive programmer may start to appear negligible.
Some labels used to categorize projects bit.ly/2zPMJFz (Source: UK Infrastructure and Projects Authority, "Annual report on major projects 2017-2018"). The article in IEEE Spectrum claimed that among 133 projects none were "green", which I found slightly depressing, but not extraordinary. It also mentions that failure is part of the innovation process, which I fully agree with (where only repeated failure is worse). Sometimes projects get canceled and the previous investments become sunk costs. A couple of days ago another article mentioned that Lidl lost 500 million euro over many years to finally give up on using a platform developed by SAP. We see that the more ambitious projects are, the higher risks they carry. While label colors reflect this, it is unclear how much they mean to the actively engaged problem solvers sweating every small detail.
An interesting article describes the inefficiency of having a car engine run at stops bit.ly/2mutqb3 and provides a pointer to an electronic device that could help reduce fuel consumption and emissions. Always nice to see when someone starts by describing a real problem, introduces a solution and then lets people decide how good it is instead of telling them that it is "much better than", "unlike any other" or costing "only" so much.
Possibility of firm bankruptcy bit.ly/2uFZ4q0. Interesting that people have tried to create models to predict this. Shared mainly for its beauty, not for its accuracy.
Is it just me who finds the repeated titles "Getting ready", "How to do it", "How it works", "There is more to it...", "See also" in each chapter of a book (think 50 times) unacceptable? Don't repeat yourself is a high bar for some writers/editors/publishers. And it takes some non-trivial thinking how to weave the text to achieve that. Much easier is to dump it into something that appears structured, where the pieces are so disconnected and superficially treated that no long train of thought could ever be initiated. Who wants to read page fillers?
Seems that manually getting geocoordinates is less reliable than one might think bit.ly/2zMDVA8. Here I tried to draw the bike paths in Germany as seen on Radtourenchef. Unfortunately, few places did not exist on the map, so I had to remove their points. Once I draw the connections with straight lines they looked anything but believable (no need to even color the paths to see this). That a path moves from the north to the south with zero intermediate locations, looks like a severe mistake (and there seem to be many). The only thing that can be inferred is that southeast Germany (Bayern) has the highest concentration of notable bike paths according to Radtourenchef. You may not see it, but there are 570 unique locations on this map, so it wasn't a small effort to obtain their (sometimes likely invalid) geocoordinates.
Never heard about this useful function letting you compute how long it would take to repay a given loan knowing the payment and interest rates bit.ly/2zKeaR4. In the example provided, if interest rate was zero, it would take 53.33 months to repay the loan. But at 7% interest rate, this requires almost 11 additional months. The bank would be happy.
A relatively good/cheap SSD like this one from SanDisk (240GB) seems nice-to-have amzn.to/2mkADKP, but I see two potential problems. First, I am still on a single-core machine (by choice, ask yourself why), so this will likely not unfold the full bandwidth of the device and it may saturate the slow CPU. Second, shipping and customs would add 50% to the device price, which makes this purchase a lot less interesting. But if you are on Amazon's land, it may seem reasonable to you, which may also remove one spinning part from your device, slightly reduce its power consumption and make it run up to a couple of times faster. Another assumption is that it may speed up the handling of big datasets if you find yourself in need to do data analysis. If your budget allows, you may choose a version with more capacity.
Is it possible to 3D print mirrors for a telescope? Wondering how advanced and accurate this technology has become. Also not having access to PopSci or similar. Speaking of mirrors, we have relatively little sunshine these days and I remembered that one technique photographers use to improve the quality of their photos in such cases is to place mirrors on the side which reflect light to the main subject. What if I made my main subject a plant and used one/more mirrors to reflect sunshine back to it to try stimulating its growth? Could this even work, is it stupid or just cost-stupid? Perhaps the mirrors can adjust according to the sun rays' angle of inclination (computer vision), the soil composiition could be optimized (data analysis), a sensor could signal when uninvited guests have arrived (e.g. spiders drinking spare water from the saucer), an IoT system can control the amount and frequency of water drops for less variance, a 3D plant model could mark in green which parts are ready to be cropped. Must smell like basil.
You could place a generic bed into your bedroom, at least until your backbone starts to hurt bit.ly/2zSvbZx
Suppose that in exchange for an increase of a membership fee with 90$, you earn a one-time right to buy an item 100$ cheaper (having other choices as well). If you buy exactly this item, you have "saved" 10$ or at least you might think so. Now you get the additional information that this is said to be one of the most deeply discounted items you could buy. Would this make you happy, inform you to cancel your membership in the future or motivate you to buy a lot more slightly discounted items (some of which you may not need) in order to compensate for your membership fee? An interesting dilemma, but possibly slightly less so on the selling side.
The openness of countries is also an important topic itself and one good thing about open data is that it can foster/encourage it. Again, by choosing to visit, you agree to support the typical practices there. And if you hear how "discredited people must be bankrupted", this statement could quickly make you rethink whether to touch this ground. You don't want to be welcomed at a place where someone could be actively working in the background to eliminate the inconvenient. This is not open.
"Open" may not be truly open the way you define it, similarly to how organic food may not be sugar-free despite the fact that someone wants to convince you that it is healthy. You have to check the labels/terms of use to understand whether they are consistent with your expectations. And if they aren't, you have the choice to avoid the open participation and resource usage. Remember that if you use a resource, you become automatically a supporter of the practices behind it. Of all open data sites, I found only 3-4 whose terms of use I found problematic and didn't consider open enough. If possible, when you work with open data, always try to read the small letters to avoid any surprises later.
Being tolerant doesn't mean accepting incompetence as a story of intolerance. Once someone tries to defend their work this way, the saddle point of the trust function has been reached and the tendency has become clear.
A woman said she visied 119 countries, having a goal to visit all 174 (if I remember correctly). I also like traveling, but never allow it to determine my life. For me it is always bound with very concrete goals. I tend to evaluate the project, the people, the skills to be used and the reward. And I rarely wander around wasting time. She spoke about personal growth and how important connections/friendships truly are; to me connections matter much less and only when. If you aren't mindful who you speak with, you end up knowing too many people, which then start calling, inviting you to go out, make you look after their kids etc. Each additional contact takes you time until you are left with none. What kind of life is that? Always keeping the minimum number of connections.
"Anerkennung drückt sich nicht nur in Worten aus." bit.ly/2zH3ZwJ Genauso ist es. All the companies I left and the people I stopped speaking with have forgotten or were unwilling to hear about the importance of this point. Quite possible that they are still looking for people.
Made myself a little reminder yesterday after trying two apps, which I didn't like. The first app consistently used 1.3% CPU and 3% memory while doing nothing except polling and the second had a non-intuitive interface, where I couldn't find the option I was looking for. The code I wrote only shows a popup window and allows me to hit the close button, then waiting on the next event. Good that it was possible to run it in the background without the need to keep a console window open. Resource usage was so low that it wasn't even registering on the first screen of top. Then after moving away for a while and coming back to turn off the machine and go to bed, I saw a big window "Turn off the boiler". Seems that good things happen when you least expect them. So now I had to go back and do the "manual" work of pushing a button, but even this can sometimes be better than doing nothing.
Didn't watch the game of the games. Also avoiding people who associate with concrete teams or try to impose their results in front of me.
Ratio between median value of million dollar homes to median value of homes for some US cities bit.ly/2uCj1Or. Surprised to see Houston at the top of what could be considered home inequality. San Jose, which has the highest median values, appears last, which means that according to the article, it must be a place where the most expensive homes of the rich look most similar to the homes of ordinary people. Or at least, this is my interpretation.
Happy not having to discuss my decisions with too many people. Went to see how the Python mailing list looks like and this was my first thought.
Amost no screen time today. At midday I spent some time observing the life of the refrigerator and more specifically how often it chooses to breathe and for how long. Noticed that when it was calm, usage was 0W. Opening the refrigerator section led to 13.5W, while opening the camera section led to no difference (yet there is no light inside). In active mode, it started from 97W and very gradually came down to 80W, keeping this level for a relatively long time. Immediately after plugging it in, it used 500W, but only for a brief time. Then at the afternoon washed some clothes, cleaned the kitchen from some pests, which were conquering the oats and the rice (unfortunately had to check everything else to figure this out). Then received a "gift" in the form of wild blueberries, 4.5kg, which traveled approximately 400km, to be cleaned from any impurities and put in bags, facing the inside of the camera. Then noticed some slack at the small terrace, where a couple of containers stayed empty and it bugged me that I had soil, but no seeds. Went for seeds (25 min walk), took rosemary and watercress (strangely the store offered almost no choice this time) and planted them in the evening, dealing with moist soil and the cleaning of fine particles. Tired and falling asleep now. Tomorrow (today) (hopefully) I will have some more time to read/write code.
I was excited about open data at the beginning (which I think was also visible here), learning a lot in a very short time thanks to your effort and hard work. But then this excitement gradually started to disappear: most websites seemed to be updated only very infrequently if at all. Or they contained old data that was no longer relevant. Or they used platforms overloaded with content, where finding valuable one was possible, but took a disproportionate amount of time and required deep concentration. Also, some of the more interesting datasets are incredibly rich (size in the gigabytes range), so it takes a lot of time to download them, load them and glance through a good amount of the data in order to understand it, understand what type of questions it could answer, how valuable they could be and how these answers can be woven into something meaningful. Takes a lot of work, thinking, tinkering and dealing with edge cases where the availabiilty of values is optional. This raises the possibility of making mistakes and having a viewer question the accuracy of the results. Sometimes also due to the fact that the data is incomplete by default and there is not much we can do about this, when we were fully separated from the way it was collected. All this leaves one dissatisfied; despite all attempts to prevent mistakes, it is always possible that an error will sneak somewhere. At the same time I remembered how someone said that people don't like paying for news in general, which is constantly proven on a daily basis. Perhaps this type of content isn't interesting or at least my way of presenting it wasn't. I am also consistently questioning whether my contribution is great enough, given that the majority of the effort has been in the data collection/labeling phase. This led me to believe that perhaps I am doing something wrong here, by attempting to let my curiosity walk into these "foreign homes", which it will never be able to truly comprehend and which are better left as beautiful as they are. The feeling of understanding could be nothing more than a fallacy. For this reason, in the future I will try to work much less with data, especially open data. If the right circumstances present themselves, I will still stay open to any possibilities.
If you believe that you simply "need" a website, you might be right. But history has shown that being unable to define what makes your site unique can quickly make it indistinguishable from the hundreds of other similar alternatives once they are available. Then the apparent need suddenly becomes a liability—you continue to pay for years to programmers and designers, for domain and hosting, for social media account management, for supporting systems/processes and so on, but you rarely see the return on that, because all your competitors look like you, do and sound the same. Then you enter a physical store and tell yourself—great, they sell a lot of products here and make a good profit, so perhaps I could replicate this success online! And you tell yourself that you "need" an online store as it will help you sell more, become independent and chase your dreams at scale. Now the problem is that hundreds of other stores have started to open and yours is once again somehow lost in the noise. But you are young and still believe to have plenty of options. Then you tell youself that cryptocurrencies will make you rich and that you "need" to be active in this area as well, so you go and buy yourself expensive hardware and hope that this way you will be able to multiply your money while sitting in front of the TV, crunching popcorn. But after a while everyone starts thinking this way and they all invest in the same hardware with a similar intention. Now the system gets busier and more sluggish, and it starts to return much less to each participant on average. This can't be real, you think. What could be the reason that "need" was never enough? Lack of sufficient starting capital, lack of differentiation, concept quality, lack of long-term strategy/vision, inability to execute or something else? It could be many factors that in their whole have led to this result. Yet, Jim Rohn had a shocking lesson for us all: "You are paid relative to the value you bring to the market." That is. This value, more than anything else, is determined by uniqueness. If you are connecting people and are the only company called Facebook, you become incredibly valuable. If you are the only producer of Coca-Cola and most people enjoy your beverages, you are certainly quite valuable. If you are the biggest bookstore and your success can't be repeated, you have become incredibly valuable. By providing something noone else can. So the question is not what we need, but how unique is what we can provide. Whenever a client starts a conversation around their need, ask yourself whether their work is truly unique and justifies help on your side; otherwise you might be wasting your time on a "me-too" project.
Whether something is significant or not, depends only on you making it significant.
The effect of a good and quick payment can be overshadowed by having to work with a client that is quite slow to respond or not sure about the direction of the project, leading to frequently changing requirements. This way the person implementing the project must stay idle most of the time, do waste work or seek to guess the intention of the client, which can easily lead to project failure. If within the same timeframe three other clients can be served and the collective revenue would slightly exceed the one connected with this single client, then serving this person is perhaps not a good idea. And it is much better to diversify the sources of revenue. Possibly explains why good/quick payments aren't everything.
When I type a destination quickly and it appears letter by letter, what does this mean? Are you tracking each of my keystrokes (without returning any results), making Ajax requests to a database every 10ms or sharing my information with advertisers in real-time?
Big, heavy, slow systems. Responsible for flight checking if only you were patient enough. Understandable that users who spent 2-3 mins waiting for the offers to appear will be terrified by the possibility of losing their "binding" session. By seeing less options per unit of time, they are effectively nudged to accept the more expensive ones. Whether this is acceptable, only the travelers can decide.
Are you doing more with less or less with more?
Tracking the resource usage of a process of interest bit.ly/2mekFBR
Two German economics professors: "Salaries in Germany are too low because of the very high productivity and salaries elsewhere in Europe are too high because of the very low productivity." Neither, nor. Both are more likely explained by the willingness to exploit and the inability to do so. Which has much less to do with productivity than one might think. Sad to see "high-profile" people traveling across Europe to explain the rest how inferior they are. Doesn't matter: after the Brexit we'll check again how prevalent arrogance continues to be and it could be interesting to see whether people will connect it once again with the need for further exits. Because if they do, nationality and position may play a much smaller role than one might think.
Visualization of the last actions on directory files bit.ly/2usSFOJ. May be useful on rare occassions when it is unclear what happened within a directory; visualization can help to find outliers.
Simple disk usage feedback bit.ly/2mcwicA. Here 1KB has 1024 (and not 1000) bytes.
That 300MW of installed solar capacity is sufficient to power approximately 210000 homes tells me that the average US household uses ≈4.0-4.8x more electricity than a directly observable one. Hard to imagine how many (smart) devices/appliances such a home has.
Someone could pay regularly slightly more than usual to prevent a disease or they could avoid the payments and health checks, letting the disease progress to a point where it becomes very hard to heal it and where each subsequent treatment/intervention costs 100x the initial amount. It would be easy to claim that they didn't have a choice, but fact is, they were responsible even for their inaction. When someone refuses to seek help on time and suddenly appears and expects everything to be fixed by a magic wand, in a short time and within a tight budget, their expectations may have become unrealistic. And even with the best intention in mind, a person may be reluctant to help due to the risk of not meeting these expectations, being worried about the impact of an unhappy customer on their future practice. A similar dilemma seems to exist in software too—many companies try to implement their projects very cheaply by cutting all kinds of costs and then start wondering why this has become quite expensive.
Have you noticed how the creators of some libraries try to trick you into believing that they created something incredibly complex and deep? By having a project full of directories with hundreds of files, each having up to 3 lines of code... It is easy to imagine how impressed a reviewer would be by looking at this, especially when they don't take the time to see what a nonsense the whole is.
Took off some small leaves from the basil to practice my findings about drying. Looked which were extraneous or interfered with others and removed them (as in code). Some water, sunshine, only 1.5 days after snipping and a dangerous fall from height did not prevent the plant from restoring its original, beautiful crown. Will see whether the mint likes more sun as well, but it could have been damaged by cutting some of the main stems from a low point. Once I saw this... please ensure that you don't cut too much and that the plant has a chance to restore itself and bring you joy longer. If in doubt, remember what the anteater did.
"In Hong Kong they don't eat bread... and everyone looks so beautiful.", said a store owner while speaking with someone else. Somehow implies that someone must be rich in order to behave intelligently—something to disagree with. As I saw yesterday, having the convenient/pleasant options taken away from you may actually unconsciously improve your options. The example given was people in USA consuming lots of meat and other junk food (suffering many heart attacks) and people in some African countries relying mainly on plant-based food (and registering almost no cases). But if you said that by default all Americans choose wisely and all Africans cannot possibly have any good choice, you would be wrong twice in a single sentence.
It is not you who will determine how much I get paid, but you have the option to bid against that and see whether your project will be accepted or rejected. Usually I avoid working a second time with people who previously rejected me (common) or who I previously rejected (common)—out of fear having negative sentiment affect the quality of future work.
Many companies hire 1000+ people and then start believing that the cost of hiring one additional person should converge towards zero. And many people who enter later for some reason agree to buy into this well-knit lie. And if they don't have self-respect, that makes it so much easier for the rest to "postpone" theirs and manipulate them easily. You could try to promote the idea that work should be free in front of me to see how far you could come, but you will have to fear speaking for the last time, either as a member of a big group of people or as a CEO of a company. I also seek someone to do my work for free.
Many years later learning about a new shortcut: Ctrl + Del (without Alt) to delete words after the cursor. I always used Ctrl + Backspace to do the same for words appearing before it. As they say, everything comes in pairs.
In the ingredient tables I often see mono-, di- and tri- of something, but with chemicals I rarely know when less or more is better. Sufficient reason to stay away from the ones the body didn't produce itself.
Which recipe among five could best satisfy our own taste? One way to think about this could be in terms of calories received or total satisfaction. Depending on what we are interested in, we can assign an index from 0 to 100 (for better accuracy). Then we could assign costs for all "materials and resources" allowing us to make the final dish. If 50g olives, 200g cheese and 250g salad have to be used (among many others), we could multiply each of these values with the price of the products and sum the totals at the end. But to this amount we also have to add the cost of the resources used: you probably agree that baking for 20mins at 150℃ and for 2hours at 200℃ are different things. Or using the large hob for 30min at degree level 2 is different from using the small hob for 10mins at degree level 3. How many kitchen devices will be utilized in the preparation and for how long? How many plates/bowls needed for intermediate steps will have to be cleaned later? What percentage of the total preparation time requires manual work and what does this cost us relative to our hourly wage? Once we have this clarity and add the resource cost to the materials cost, we could use normalized satisfaction index / normalized total cost as a metric to rank the recipes. Not a perfect example, but adjustments are possible anytime. Glad that it fits in a bit.
Land yield comparison bit.ly/2m8SPqG
Parks in Bristol, UK bit.ly/2m8juUQ
"But if the cost of your survival exceeds potential taxpayer savings, your life is deprioritized" bit.ly/2m7FFKR. Also: "High-tech tools that perfect human rights and strenghten human capacity are more difficult to build than those that do not".
Global Innovation Magazine seems an interesting one, but the fact that it is available only on Issuu and not as PDF makes it very hard to read. I need to load ads every couple of page turns, the fullscreen mode allows the ad to take the bottom of the screen, the interface feels bulky and non-responsive (it takes ≈10s to turn a page and 3s to zoom on the right section). Do you know of other innovation magazines that are interesting, but less popular?
One article mentioned the problem with the lack of truck drivers and identified two possible reasons to be low payments and overtime. Knowing very little about trucks or driving, I tried to jot down what else could be causing this situation bit.ly/2zhOrzi. Didn't even come to algorithmic inefficiency of road selection, improper task allocation sequences or competition pushing the less effiective businesses out of the market.
Watched a very small part of some cycling race in France today (usually staying away from TV). Noticed how getting water and food during the race can be distracting. Then wondered whether a 500g reduction in the weight of an already lightweight bike, if this would cost 1000-2000$ more, is money well spent compared to exchanging a sloppy 400g shoe for a 100g one at a cost of 200-300$. The pictures convinced me that it is not only the bike that contributes to the weight, but also the helmet, the shoe, the equipment, even the cyclist himself. Yet, I suppose that exclusively focusing on weight reduction would actually reduce performance.
It is not only important to learn, but also to observe how we are learning and to choose carefully what we learn. If we improve fast, but at a very high price, we may end with a good amount of debt making our subsequent learning very hard or impossible. Would learning this improve our situation tomorrow or would it be a waste of time and resources?
Decided to take a look at the design of some metro/bus timetables available on the web. The ones I have seen so far were not great; almost every plan had at least one or more aspects that could have been improved. Some were so disorganized that I couldn't tell immediately what I was looking at. Some integrated the assumptions how people might want to look at the data into complex, hard-to-follow drawings. Some had poor contrast (grey background with a thin font), some asked for start and end point via an online interface, where there was no way to select a station if you didn't know or couldn't remember its name. Also no hints were shown on typing; when a map was available, an improper zoom level allowed for very rough/imprecise target setting. Some timetables wasted a lot of whitespace or showed hard-to-read vertical labels. Some crammed too much content close together so that individual times became hard to separate. Some plans were not print-friendly, others which were had 40-50 pages of content for a single route. One of the plans I liked most came from MVV (Munich), although the interface used to arrive at the printed materials was slightly dated and not always intuitive. I also noticed that bigger cities had slightly more polished plans compared to smaller ones, but opportunities for improvement are everywhere.
Finding Energy Star washing machines with desirable properties bit.ly/2m3WTbS
Cities by number of business hotels having five stars (Source: Five Star Alliance website) bit.ly/2ueDcl5. Forbes has also written a more detailed article on the topic bit.ly/2lZVjYl
Street lamps by their wattage in Melbourne bit.ly/2uduaVM (Source: City of Melbourne, "Feature Lighting", bit.ly/2uf6jVx). The lamp with the max wattage is 500W, while the total power consumption of all 4090 street lights with known wattage is 213033W. The median came at only 35W, while the average is slightly over 52W.
Looking at the streets with the currently fastest average speed in South Dublin bit.ly/2m0bZPu (Source: South Dublin City Council, bit.ly/2zl1rEa)
You may like at least one of these Häagen-Dazs icecream flavor combinations bit.ly/2m5AhrD
Learned that the anteater digs the anthill carefully without destroying it, then pushes its 60cm long sticky tongue inside many times per minute, but takes only ≈140 ants, after which it moves to the next anthill. This is to ensure that on the next return, this place still has enough ants to feed it. Did not expect this animal to be so clever.
Positioning the figures for the next chess game may seem a bit tedious, but few lines of code offer some help bit.ly/2m1WcQl. You could also rewrite the second line as flank + main + list(reversed(flank)), saving one function call.
Datahub published a GeoJSON file with the contours of many countries, which you may find useful in your own work. Here you can see the contours of Germany as an example bit.ly/2lXPL0x
Initially, I was very frustrated to see functions with twelve parameters, when my mind refused to accept so much information at once. Then came datasets with fifty and more features, large matrices and algorithms operating on them in non-obvious ways. Whenever I wanted to print and see what happens with a matrix, the output quickly filled my screen, so I had to learn to be more selective. Recently I saw a datasheet of a microcontroller having 176 pins (some of these are reserved for output as well) bit.ly/2m0BSyN, which reminded me that complexity is subjective. This chip probably holds many different functionalities together, but we know nothing about how efficiently they cooperate and whether in our particular case we truly need all of them (we pay the full cost). When something is too complex, it is easy to hide/mask inefficiencies/imperfections or explain design decisions as tradeoffs. Even when abstractions are powerful and ease our thinking, I still think that we should strive more towards simplicity at the conceptual stage—eliminating the needless and avoiding the tendency to pick fail-safe/tried-and-tested defaults.
Once a mere-mortal sees this, can they do something useful with it, make it practical, visible, real, memorable? Or as long as it is sufficiently abstract and intricate there is no reason to bother about that? Are we working for others or for ourselves? The market size of the last is one and it's a lonely place to be.
Happiness levels in various countries seen from above (2015-2017) bit.ly/2zgaR3T. Not surprising why more people from Africa are taking the risky path to Europe. We see a pronounced happiness "staircase" in that direction. It is expected that a world boosting a high degree of inequality will at some point have to deal with its own creation. Saying this as an European.
"More than 90% of the world's population live in areas with levels of air pollution that exceed WHO guidelines" and "Research suggests that plastic waste in the world's water is finding its way into humans. People eating seafood could be ingesting up to 11000 pieces of microplastic every year. Microplastics are found in 83% of the world's tap water." - "The Global Risks Report 2018" by the World Economic Forum
Top 20 solar system installers by installed capacity (in kW) in the NREL Open PV project database bit.ly/2lYh0rW. Happy that this time the machine didn't fail me although it was fully unresponsive for around 10 mins. If the data is correct and current, SolarCity has installed ≈1.193TW, which relative to the 16.523TW announced on the project's main page means that 7.2% of the total installed capacity belong to this company. Sunpower, the next company on the list has 3.7 times less installed capacity than SolarCity, which is not a small difference. Made this primarily to learn about more companies in the sector. Initially, I saw "Self" at the end of the list and had some doubts about it, but after searching for "Self Solar" on the web, they quickly dispersed. The cities with the most installed solar capacity include Roseville, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Bakersfield, San Jose, Fresno, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Lancaster, Indianapolis (in that order).
Beautiful street carpets bit.ly/2u9hCyF ↗
Virtue tracking card bit.ly/2u6oMn5. Be aware that it won't store your data.
Frequently having to remind myself that direct clicks sometimes come at a penalty. For instance, reading PDFs in the browser is something I dislike (especially on scroll). But when I click on a link to a PDF document, it is downloaded and opened in the browser, after which I have to click the download arrow, which sometimes starts another download of the same document before it finally appears on the disk. Much easier and faster: right click on PDF link, "save link as...", save. Download happens only once.
Collecting parking occupancy data very frequently (say every 5 mins) may not be such a good idea. The frequency has to be adjusted at least in some way to the planned lifetime of the project. For instance, if it was initiated 5 years ago, then we can estimate the number of collected data points per parking to be (5 years * 12 months * 30 days * 24 hours * 60 mins) / 5 mins = 518400. If the city has many car parks using this system, this could create an amount of information very hard to analyze later. Moreover, the changes between the points may seem so small that we start questioning their significance. We could also ask ourselves how critical it is to have always absolutely accurate information, adjusting the velocity of the stream accordingly. Tracking a car park may be less critical than tracking the processes in a nuclear power plant or in a high-frequency trading system.
Comparison of two Gaussian distributions bit.ly/2lVKsPj
Characteristics of some fuel-economical SUV car models according to AutoBild bit.ly/2lUMeAk. Takes in account displacement (cc), power (HP), weight (kg), acceleration (0-100, s), top speed (km/h), fuel (diesel/super), original price (euro), test date, test consumption (l/100km) and shows the rank each car was given. Looks like the algorithm placed the only cars using super instead of diesel close together (8 and 10). For some reason it believes that 21 has more distinctive characteristics compared with the rest and we see that this is a quite powerful car. But that we see 5 not too far from 18 comes slightly surprising.
Merck product sales for 2017 bit.ly/2lQVoO1. In the top five of the best-selling products appear two for diabetes treatment and two vaccines. You can also see AstraZeneca's product sales for 2017 bit.ly/2lPqdme. At the top appear two respiratory and three cardiovascular/metabolic products. In both diagrams, only concrete products with known sales have been shown. Whenever products were considered in a group having a single sales value, they were not shown.
Health care facilities in San Francisco, California bit.ly/2z8KwV5 (via DataSF). Most general acute care hospitals seem to be located at the north of the city. There are also two interesting clusters, but there was a minor inconvenience while trying to find out more about them bit.ly/2lS1fCT. My desired behavior would have been to have the numbers stick to the points as in the original picture without having to adjust the code.
Some upcoming events in Florence, Italy bit.ly/2u1hT6M. Reading about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo made me want to learn more about the city and create this page. You can also see a sample path to visit the 15 top-rated tourist attractions in this city bit.ly/2lTAQ7G.
The nutrition table on the oats package tells me that 100g resemble only 7% of the recommended daily energy dose (kcal). Someone who doesn't see what is written below, might assume that they need to consume 1428g of oats throughout the day to come to the 100% of energy. But if they covered this need in this way, they would have an oversaturation with microelements as only 250g of oats cover 100% of the needs for calcium, magnesium, zinc and some others. Meaning that by trying to weigh on a single parameter we would be (very) wrong surprisingly often.
Do you think there could be something like a "work album"? A reflection of common style typical for a limited time period of the life of its creator. What if a portfolio isn't a consistent style throughout an entire life, but a collection of many work albums (something to which we return often)? Where does one end and another one start? Which pieces fit together and why? Whenever I look at websites presenting portfolios, the answers to these questions often remain unclear to me. That's strange, because my own work has probably been "periodic" in one form or another. A possible reason why perfectly polished portfolios don't look natural to me. But they seem to be of the type people enjoy most.
Initially, I liked having straight edges in graphs. Simple to construct, beautiful, existence of force-directed layouts, visible intersections, available metrics like betweenness / closeness / eigenvector centrality, counting of cliques / connected components. But then, at least it appeared to me, the real world is less than linear. To go from A to B, someone may need to travel around, depending on which road is currently under construction. This trajectory can take any shape, which a straight edge cannot capture well. We may assume that just because there is a theoretical connection, a real one exists too, but an obstacle on the way may prevent the driver from moving towards the destination and force it to return to the last, known to be good location (A). On a graph we can only increase the weight to communicate that the cost of passing through the edge has increased (or remove the edge altogether), but we need to have prior knowledge about that where in reality someone needs to have been in the situation that asked for the change in the model, which is then eventually communicated after the fact and once again has temporal nature. Our world is not certain, but the certainty of the straight line is somehow embedded; to add more realism to the path, we would need significantly more detail (think how many point coordinates you would need to describe a long, winding Bezier curve), which is expensive to obtain, maintain and compute with. So we fall back to the straight edges with questionable weights.
The countless algorithms with fancy names do not change the fact that classification and regression remain only two. And it is not very surprising that when we find new data and attempt to hammer it with these two nails only, we leave out a lot of potential insight undiscovered (opinion).
"People are good at generalizing newly acquired knowledge". As long as the assumptions are clearly communicated, this may be a lesser problem than staying absolutely silent due to the risk of potential errors or a flawed logic. (Not everyone may agree with this.) If you believed that floats are extremely accurate, machine learning always 100% correct, all algorithms exact (never approximate), Bayesian networks always perfectly capable of quantifying uncertainty, mathematical modeling always precise in describing real-world phenomena or all papers ever written had no mistakes, you are in it for a surprise. The fact that we continue to use all these tools and resources despite their limitations tells us something. Therefore, please do not hesitate to commicate clearly (even your generalizations), but be highly selective and remain open for feedback.
Budgets are also frequently cited in large, bulk numbers, which normal people have a hard time to comprehend. Much easier to speak in front of others when noone understands you rather than make the effort to explain what this budget means to a concrete person. There is also an increased risk of conflict if these people see an element of injustice that applies specifically to them.
"Hundreds of trillions" is a strangely incomprehensible phrase to find in two separate, independent articles. The one describing the possible number of bacteria in the gut and the other the possible number of neurons in the brain. (Unfortunately, I haven't kept the references.) Whether there could be a connection between the two is hard to say, but I remember creating a graphic trying to hint about that. Back then I didn't suspect that the numerics might also agree, at least superficially; this could simply be my own confirmation bias. But the common theme is that at such scale even supercomputers are said to have a hard time. Sufficient reason to keep a secret from the DOM.
Someone created a great interactive tube map of London bit.ly/2lPh1OM, showing the stations by historical daily entries and exits. Much better than my own attempt from a while ago.
Locations of the bottle banks in Berlin bit.ly/2z6rxuw
I don't like watching films, but do you think some of these could be interesting? bit.ly/2z6mKco
NO₂ measurements (air quality) at three locations (out of five) in Bath, UK (08.07.2014 - 02.07.2018) bit.ly/2lNURwg (Source: "Bath: Hacked", "Historical Air Quality Sensor Data", bit.ly/2z4gbXZ). Wanted to include more locations and criteria, but almost half of the parameters had missing values.
When you see this function bit.ly/2zc8Tl9, do you think in terms of two lines of code?
"I have not failed. I've just found 10000 ways that don't work" - Thomas Edison
Still "affected" by Keith Devlin's blog post on using math to improve the design of a bicycle, which I saw yesterday. The Wikipedia page he pointed to was highly informative as well. I think this touched in a great way on the possibilities of mathematical modeling. It is exciting to be able to see more such real-world applications. Examples of deep thinking, complex system representations, testing from first principle and writing of custom software with the goal of optimization. If someone can point me to more resources like this, I'd be grateful.
The sunny exponential sum seems to work fine bit.ly/2lNrdHm
Who knows, it is probably even possible to combine computer science with medicine and statistics bit.ly/2z1ioU6. Can you think of something concrete when you see such combinations for the first time and would it work if implemented? Can a combination of subjects describe the way you see your work?
As seen on HackerNews, Microsoft released new data on building footprints in all US states bit.ly/2tVsWyh (scroll down to see it). In the past, I also looked at some building footprints in some cities (find the links if interested), yet never at such scale. Ran "top" to see how fast the decoding of the big JSON file will deplete my machine's resources and as expected saw that this won't work. But sharing the link here means that hopefully someone else will be able to do what I couldn't and structure a meaningful and valuable article around their findings.
Superfoodly has published Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) values of some foods (as of 16.01.2018), so I looked to see whether I can discover something interesting bit.ly/2yUZvCf. As you can see in this partial view, three different spices had dramatically higher values when dried compared to when they were in fresh condition. This is new to me, usually assuming that fresh food is always better. Also, canola oil was given with slightly higher value than extra virgin olive oil. But even so I noticed that the maximal value in the oils category was at approximately the same level as a mid value in the olives category. This means that by processing the olives into oil, potentially useful ingredients may be lost (or so the logic of a non-professional). For nuts, pecans had the highest ORAC value, but I never saw one. I looked specifically for the more common nut types and their top-down order—walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, peanuts, cashews. Similarly, never saw an Indian Gooseberry (Amla Berry) which has a very high value. But for some other common berry types, the order was chokeberries, elderberries, wild blueberries, cranberries, mulberries, blackberries, red raspberries, blueberries, goji berries, strawberries. Of the seeds, cumin and black chia seeds made good impression (the latter having a 5.14x lower value).
Common environmental noise levels according to the Central for Hearing and Communication bit.ly/2z2S1Ng. A crying baby is said to be equivalent to someone shouting in your ear or having a disco at home. Notice how the tractor and the electric drill must also give up against it. Sadly, normal conversation appears almost at the bottom of the list, meaning that many other noise types in the environment can easily silence it.
Libraries in Raleigh, North Carolina bit.ly/2tR2wO8
Max power vs. module efficiency (STC) for LG and Jinko solar panels bit.ly/2lKxtQv. The LG solar panels seem more differentiated, whereas Jinko Solar offers many panels from different series with very similar max power and efficiency characteristics. Sometimes this difference can be as small as 5W of max power. Currently we see that both companies achieve maximal efficiencies with panels whose max power is not the highest, but falls in the mid range, which is interesting. When we also account for the panel width and height, but leave out depth, then the Eagle PERC 48 series from Jinko Solar looks most promising. The model JKM240M-48 with dimensions 132.4cm x 99.2cm weighs only 14.8kg and has 240W max power at 18.27% efficiency. If we also account for depth (total volume), then the Eagle Dual 60 series starts to look interesting. The model JKM285PP-60-DV has a thickness of only 6mm (many oher panels have 40mm) and reaches 285W max power at 17.33% efficiency. Unfortunately, this comparison is incomplete as long as the products of many other companies are left out, but it highlights how we could use all existing data to support our decisions.
Calm nesting levels are much easier to follow than overly excited ones. The second can be seen as a less obvious form of a bad code smell. Possibly worth mentioning.
Always wanted to know about my brain mass index bit.ly/2tMesjW
Glad that I was able to come up with so many and diverse ideas and implement them in reasonable time. Thousands of small pieces of functionality. If you wish to have something a lot bigger, specifically made for you, according to your requirements, it will be hard to avoid the big price tag. Working with dummerAugust has never been cheap.
Simple dot product of two patterns bit.ly/2ySDrYS
Learning from the annual reports of the airport in Sydney bit.ly/2yR0q6q. Looking the one for the year 2017 will also expose you to some beautiful design. My only problem is that for some reason I cannot stand thick, bold fonts for too long and frequently struggle to find a good balance where I have to use a bold font. Perhaps this is why font families exist, but they may not always be available to the designer.
Historical performance of some indicators of NXP semiconductor (2013 - 2017) bit.ly/2lE6FkH. The source of the data are the annual reports provided by the company.
Couldn't learn much from the Samsung's annual report. Looked specifically for performance breakdown by sector, but I might have missed it. However, they mentioned three devices which I didn't know about: a small 850g laptop (NP900X3L), a big 27" monitor with 36% lower energy consumption (LS27E65UDS) and a large 15.36TB SAS SSD on 48-layer 256GB V-NAND. I need to read less.
Revenue and market capitalization of some semiconductor companies (as of 03.01.2018) bit.ly/2lGzPQ0
Walt Disney segment revenue and operating income (2015 - 2017) bit.ly/2lIgvBX
Some litmus strips for a quick proof how far some websites have deviated from the 8s rule (for some it's a 1s rule) bit.ly/2yPTNkQ. These results were obtained on latest Chrome—imagine what would happen with an old browser. Seems that many companies have gone too far by being indifferent to the amount of content they post and the scripts they load. Speed has either lost its priority number or they want to convince us that they can't afford to find and hire at least one great web designer. When bad practices are rewarded, but good ones aren't, this leads to some measurable consequences.
if you want me to work on your project, consider using the contact page and meeting the standards described there. They haven't changed much since dummerAugust started, but if you assumed that the page is already old, simply because of not being recently updated, you would be wrong. The basics always remain the same.
A look at the hotels in Toronto listed on booking.com bit.ly/2tJEG6C
Net sales by sector for DowDuPont (2015 - 2017) bit.ly/2lDkwHO
Net sales by sector for Procter & Gamble, 2017 bit.ly/2lB9enJ
First time seeing the interesting idea of using vertical wind turbines to capture car-induced wind. Not sure how useful it can be on congested roads, with speed restrictions or with no easy connections to a grid. Not a driver myself, but I find that having something spin consistently at the front can possibly be mentally exhausting.
With some simple code and CSS/multi-column layout I shrinked all the food additives listed on Wikipedia (see E numbers) to a two-page document bit.ly/2tF5rJE. Green means this additive is approved in at least one place, red that it has been banned (or is in the process) in at least one place. Interesting reference to refer to before the next Exxx appears in sight.
Ariel, Persil, Tide or Perwoll? Why? Any chance that poorly rinsed cloth contains enough chemicals to affect our health?
Numeric look at Cadbury sweet products bit.ly/2yI1h9z
Libraries in Long Beach, California bit.ly/2lvoSku. Twelve in less than 20kB.
Slightly surprised to see how much bigger "Gates of the Arctic" is compared to the other US national parks bit.ly/2yGgCra
"More than 96% of the citizens in Hong Kong use mobile phones to access the Internet every day." In some other countries it is either too expensive to have a good mobile phone, too expensive to pay the monthly bill, or too expensive to have Internet on-the-go. This three-level "system" has been conveniently designed to maximize the number of people going into debt.
Cell radius in cellular communication systems (log scale) bit.ly/2lBbEm1. Starting to understand why some telecom operators are complaining about their infrasrtructure costs.
Range and current consumption of some wireless technologies as seen in a paper bit.ly/2tBILtE
A student estimated through mathematical modeling the efficiency of a water irrigation system and used this to find the cost of water overuse in local terms for a local project that was using many sprinklers.
Building energy benchmark, Washington DC: Source EUIs bit.ly/2lvqIle (Source: dc.gov, bit.ly/2tCV9Ka). Relatively few buildings differ from the common values by a large margin.
Hardware seems to be much simpler to sell than software, which might be a good reason why 34 of the top 100 most innovative companies were in this sector compared to only 6 in software (Clarivate Analytics report, 2017). It is much simpler to show a physical product that can be touched and felt rather than try to explain to an audience what your software does, how it can be used, which advantages it has or why it is needed. With software, there is always some degree of misunderstanding about what is included in the price or for how long, the expectation being that it covers the maintenance as well. And clients often think they know what good software looks like, believing that it is the new, trendy, highly starred or recommended product (none of these). When they come with the wrong expectations, they stimulate the good programmers to leave the profession, showing no appreciation of their work. Observe how many new gadgets were created in the last year compared to how many software products became widely known and used in the same period. One question arose in my mind the other day while walking: "In a tight economy, where everyone has to work most of the time, who is going to be able to sit down and spend time at login screens? Who will actually use that software and for how many minutes?" Remember that when some software companies thrived at first, there was frequently an "immersive user experience" element about their creations: people could sit down and spend hours of their time looking at a screen of streaming content, opportunities to contribute and get noticed. But this also means that in a world where many do not have the time, the stable base of the existing software may start to erode and new software may not be able to gain sufficient support to thrive. Hopefully, an assumption. But this possibly further strengthens the hardware industry. Devices which fully integrate into our lives tend to be more visible and memorable. They will be there even without an internet connection, without electricity, without an on-screen interface. And if this trend continues, programmers will have to be increasingly occupied with them and deal with this new looming variety rather than with the concrete, device-unrelated problems of other human beings. The question whether we need so much new hardware is not too different from whether we need so many new frameworks or even programming languages.
The publication ITRI Today, No.93 mentions that microLED displays can have more than 2000ppi resolution, more than 20000 nits brightness, low power dissipation and no backlight source. Compared to usual LCD/OLED TV screens, this could save 90% of the energy consumption. One such display was demonstrated at Computex 2018. In other words, sleep well and find yourself progressively obsolete.
Vienna's air quality sensors show very low median PM25 and PM25.1 values today: 2.79 and 3.53. It's a weekend day, but I doubt that this is the only factor.
Parking place utilization in Nottingham, UK bit.ly/2yAU62U. Tried to scale the map according to the view in Google Maps; you likely know better whether this looks well. But in all cases, it can be considered approximate.
Good to see that according to the operating budget data for 2018, the City of Toronto is planning to have a well-balanced budget bit.ly/2lvziR6. You can see the planned revenues and expenses by category, where results having a zero were excluded from the view. Reminding myself that a balanced budget is perhaps more helpful than a pure focus on higher revenue or expense suppression.
Parking place utilization of UParks in Adelaide, Australia bit.ly/2tuydfV (Source: City of Adelaide, "UPark Car Parks - Available Spaces", bit.ly/2ltaQQo). Could be slightly slower than usual. Shows only the available spaces.
Plotting the telecommunication network in Lille, France bit.ly/2yvKKVZ (Source: "Réseaux de télécommunication", bit.ly/2lu9wfP)
Thought about trying to find electronic components with some favorable property within the sea of existing options. For instance, voltage regulators with low quiescent current. Not sure whether someone would be interested in this, but a circuit designer might be. (An electronic designer claimed in a post that the designers were not designing anymore, but simply joining parts together. I thought that this is perhaps not a unique observation, but one that could easily transfer to web design as well.) Unfortunately, Mouser does not make it very simple to parse the characteristics of the components on sale. They use divs for tabular data, where the div of each row contains a class whose name ends with a number indicating the index of that row. But if we look across several components, we will see that sometimes some rows are missing, which means that selecting by the same index could possibly lead to inconsistent results. I was hoping to have more universal and non-ambiguous means of selection; thinking of regular expressions does not calm me down.
Selected traffic camera images from Surrey, Canada (21.06.2018) bit.ly/2yyMIFa (Source: City of Surrey Traffic Operations Department, bit.ly/2lqMRBq). Much better to look through the "eyes" of a city during the day. The number of available cameras is over 200, which is why only some are shown here. The page is static; refresh it to see other views.
Historical pavement condition index (PCI) of various streets in San Francisco (via DataSF) bit.ly/2lqH0fm. Between 2010 and 2011 the quality of many street segments seems to have visibly improved, but between 2012 and 2017 most streets were said to have a PCI index in the range 75-85. The last year also marks significant improvements of some street segments. We see that few which previously had an index of ≈25 quickly rose to 100. Such sharp improvement seems unique when we observe the entire period after 2000.
t-SNE on the scores from the "Academic ranking of world universities" bit.ly/2lpPO4W (Source: bit.ly/2tsqSgK). Only the first 100 universities are shown. Please, see the original source to understand the arrangement.
Used the Australian Energy Update 2017 report to create this stacked bar chart of the total energy consumption by industry in this country bit.ly/2tvJRHB. Renewable energy production is increasing, but what surprised me was to learn that Tesla has completed the largest Li-Ion battery in South Australia (Hornsdale Power Reserve).
A short video showing past public art in Tacoma, WA (28.7MB) bit.ly/2yoTJsj (Source: Office of Arts & Cultural Vitality, "Tacoma Public Art Tour", bit.ly/2ytKkj6). There are 191 images (few unavailable) with a total size of 4.6MB. One reason the video became so big could be the large screen area recorded. As you can see, scrolling was not very smooth.
Slowly developing interest in mathematical modeling lately (reducing my code output accordingly). Code frequently contains math models too, but they are too intransparent and known only to the developer who implemented the idea in several lines of code, combining individual letter-variables, whose meaning only they know. But it's exactly this meaning that is interesting, as it allows us to see how the parameters are related (as a very simplified example, consider period and frequency) in the model. Reading letters only all day long is anything but creatively stimulating and I feel that it harms my ability to think clearly. (It also did so when I started programming.) In a known mathematical model we can at least use our intuition and judgement to identify why the elements are connected in a particular way, whether one or more unknown ones are missing or whether there are too many. And it is especially enriching to look at models from a variety of fields, describing a variety of situations, environments, complex systems, decisions and assumptions. Pure code cannot capture the essence of this thinking (sometimes filling entire papers and books), it simply gives it another, machine-understandable representation. By reading only the code we are often observing the effect, while the actual cause may remain hidden to us.
Non-negative matrix factorization of the data describing the pedestrian footfall in Dublin city centre (25-34 week, 2014) bit.ly/2ypSMQj. Intuitively, if a point is far from the most dense point cloud(s), then it must be the most dissimilar to them. Points at the upper right corner seem to be such; we see that they correspond to the locations Grafton St at Card Gallery and Grafton St at M&S. Now, if we return and look specifically for these locations in the data, we will see that during peak times in some days they have registered ≈4000 pedestrians in a single hour, which is much more compared to the other locations. Update: The result of scaling the data followed by independent component analysis is also available bit.ly/2tndMS6.
Cost of Li-Ion batteries over time bit.ly/2tieZKl. They expect that the price could still halve until 2025 (after almost halving in the years 2015-2017). In absolute terms, however, it may seem that the pace of innovation is slowing.
Some land parcels in Philadelphia bit.ly/2ylKmJQ (data: City of Philadelphia, Department of Planning and Development, bit.ly/2lfWse3). The map appears slightly distorted since I did not check the proper aspect ratio initially. These are slightly less than 10% of all parcels; doing much more on my machine would be infeasible. However, plotting detail-rich maps made of polygons frequently gives nice results.
Historic annual average daily traffic (AADT) of the busiest street in New York since 1977 bit.ly/2liWG4g according to on.ny.gov/2tgyOSr. Only this street meets the criteria of having AADT more than 200000 in all examined years. But its label reads "GEO WASHINGTON between NJ LINE G WASHINGTON BR RT and END 1/9/95I OLAP START 1/95I", which Google does not seem to find. For some reason I have a hidden feeling that it tries to describe the George Washington Bridge, which has its separate Wikipedia page bit.ly/2tiPyZj, containing the gem "... the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge" and describing on the right which areas it connects. I knew about the Brooklyn Bridge, but not about this one. When I saw the picture, my first reaction was that I must be looking at the Los Angeles bridge...
Great websites do not monopolize the CPU and their designers care deeply about the scripts they execute in order to show the buttons on the page. Because if they don't, their competitors will. During the work on the last bit I was slowed down on several occasions, which makes me even happier now that I finished. Still, this could have been faster. Perhaps not every suitcase or backpack needs to have a hover animation showing what is inside once it opens.
Comparing suitcases and backpacks bit.ly/2yn4Di0
Plotting the Montreal's road network and a close-up bit.ly/2lgeHjK (data: "Service des infrastructures, de la voirie et du transport - Division de la géomatique", "Géobase - réseau routier", bit.ly/2lj1oix). Took an hour on a slow machine despite the optimized code.
Library attendance by branch in Montreal, Canada (01.01.2012 - 31.12.2017) bit.ly/2lgiiyc
Trees in Montreal, Canada bit.ly/2tfrdDA. The given median age is relative to the current date. Had to translate from French and fix dates with Vim.
I usually browse with the soundcard turned off, not just sound level set to zero. A minor detail that makes me avoid something I use rarely and allows me to stay concentrated on my current activity. On the one side, automatically played videos can't reach me, but on the other, voices in videos frequently remain mysterious to me. Which is why normally I hope to see a transcript as an alternative content (like the "alt" in images).
Suggestions how to improve a paper: have a short "meta" description (3 sentences at most in normal font weight, using sufficient margin that would make it stand out from the body); remove the extensive list of names, reference numbers and years at the start of the body (keep a reference at the end); very clearly indicate the problem you are trying to solve (use as much bold but only on as few words as possible) and why solving it is important at all; keep a well-structured exposition; describe your approach in depth without omitting important/relevant details (think about reproducibility); avoid or at least reduce near-duplicate content (e.g. images filtered to a slightly different effect/progress frames); batch content types (or avoid frequent switches between text and images/diagrams); avoid keyword stuffing (also check whether you assume pre-existing knowledge); omit phrases like "In this paper...", "our result is better than..."; reduce unnecessary words; avoid theorems and proofs if possible (but have them at the end for those who are interested); do not extend mathematical reductions over several pages (simplify, simplify); express formulas in words instead of variables where possible; choose a less pretentious word than "conclusion" for your final paragraph where you explan your result and take a moment to evaluate its vitality and fitness for real-world applications; finish with a small thank-you to the people who helped you and the organizations who sponsored your research, if any. Be wary that a bad font or inconsistent letter-spacing can decrease readability; ensure that at common-percentage zoom (e.g. 200%, 250% or 300%) the text fits a small-screen 4:3 frame neither leaving too much white space, nor too little (or negative in case of disappearing text at the start and end of each line). You may disagree on some points or I might have missed some other, important details.
The nature of relationships is that they tend to atrophy over time when some external force does not keep them constantly refreshing. Many people forget this, start taking their connections for granted and then wonder where some people disappeared (possibly attaching some bad labels to them). Noone owes you anything; if you weren't present enough, feel free to live happily with your other connections. Once you are (unexpectedly) removed, consider it permanent.
As they say, "you always get what you pay for". Or not. This does not exactly describe how I work; people who tried to start a project with me in the past know that they can't necessarily expect it. And if for some reason they take my availability for granted, they may find themselves with plenty of options. Better to have slightly more scared clients than ones who approach me as if any behavior should be possible.
Do you think that AI can be part of an elevator so that it learns how to behave based on the time of the day, the past usage patterns and the current combination of requests to move between the floors? So that it anticipates users and stays as close as possible to them? At the very least, do you think that it could it be a good idea, when left idle for a while, to transition it to the center of the height, so that people at the top/bottom floor have to wait half the time for it? Or is this undesirable due to potentially higher maintenance and electricity costs?
Libraries in Madison, Wisconsin bit.ly/2yibY2C. The city becomes narrow in the middle (between the two lakes Monona and Mendota) and it also seems to have lots of trees, where a small street on the "thin area" going to something like a plaza has an above average concentration.
The advantage of a library (like WU) providing the data about its catalogue is that you can type a single line of code and obtain all the results you were interested in (only the signal), in less than a second. If you were to access the data from the web site, you had to load the interface, the supporting libraries (back-end and front-end), the images, the spinner animations, the trackers/ads and the section telling you what else people like you liked in the past. Sometimes even more than that.
Strange how some websites rank and show content based on "relevance". Isn't relevance something that only the visitor can determine according to their needs?
Looked at a boxplot showing 65 variable distributions.
Productivity index per hour worked in various industries in Austria (01.2015 - 02.2018) bit.ly/2l31MRR (Source: Statistik Austria, bit.ly/2sXASOM). Dealing with waste had the highest absolute index value achieved, but there were other industries which were more stable over time, where productivity has remained consistently high (as you can see in the diagram). Notice how big the difference between manufacture of other transport equipment and of wearing apparel seems to be.
Does this hospital minimize the internal paths for the patient?
Straight-line path and intermediate stations of ICE 707 from Berlin to Munich bit.ly/2y6lVzO. Considering distance traveled per time, the short segment between Erlangen and Nürnberg seems to be the slowest on this route, followed by Nürnberg-Donauwörth.
Number of outgoing flights by carrier and destination from Pittsburgh International Airport (Dec 2017 - Apr 2018) bit.ly/2y5Zmve (Source: "Pittsburgh International Airport - Scheduled passenger traffic", bit.ly/2l0FVum). Not quite clean, but at least some destinations for which all five values for all periods were known are visible. American had most flights to Charlotte, Delta to Atlanta, United to Newark and Southwest to Chicago (Midway).
Good to see that the city of Pittsburgh currently values the overall benefits of all its trees at 4.33 million dollar. I was wondering which ones were the highest contributors to this astonishing result and created a small rank with the median values for each tree type bit.ly/2l0P2vc (Source: bit.ly/2l5LS9s). What comes surprising is that within the 30 most appreciated tree types, 8 are different types of oaks and 3 are poplars. Yet, only "Oak: Pin" and "Oak: Northern Red" appear in the top 15 most common trees. The first has 1667 exemplars and is the 8th most comon tree and the second has 973 exemplars and is the 12th most common tree. The city has 45279 trees, 3707 of which are "Maple: Norway" and 3417 are "Maple: Red", defining the landscape accordingly.
Pedestrian and bike counts on the Elliott Bay Trail in Myrtle Edwards Park, Seattle (01.01.2014 - 31.05.2018) bit.ly/2y3qDyd (Source: SDOT, bit.ly/2l1dInh). The seasonal cycling window has opened once again.
Highest source EUIs by building type in Seattle, 2015 bit.ly/2l1lkWQ. The lowest energy requirements had worship facilities and non-refrigerated warehouses (median source EUIs of 59.2 and 60.7); the highest—supermarkets/grocery stores and medical offices (median source EUIs of 608.6 and 225.6).
Daily maximums and weekly medians of bicycle counts at Fremont Bridge in Seattle bit.ly/2l18eJ9 (Source: Seattle Department of Transportation, bit.ly/2sZ11No)
Comparison of water surface degree temperature and pH at two locations in Queensland, Australia bit.ly/2l00neK (Source: Environment and Science, Queensland Government, bit.ly/2sZUW30). The spikes could be due to measurement errors or unusual situations.
This chatbot informed me of train delays in some cities in Switzerland bit.ly/2l04I1H. Zurich and Lausanne had no delays, but I was lucky to find one in Basel.
Theoretical transfer speeds of some wireless standards bit.ly/2l3HbNr. Seems that 802.11n served well for a while.
Some people connect summer with beach time. But bathing without knowing what we expose ourselves to is not a good idea in general. Sometimes, checking the daily beach water quality forecast may not be enough; we could also see historical data about a given beach. This is what the UK environment agency provides, for instance. As you can see bit.ly/2l4O1SB, one of the beaches was in more than 50% of the cases with increased risk level for swimmers. Some beaches had 0% such cases, but they were examined only 15 times, so I decided to exclude them from the data. But there are plenty of other beaches which went through many probes and were in most cases found in normal condition. You can also see a comparison of the water quality of three selected beaches over time bit.ly/2xYZtbV. The most frequent reasons cited for the risk of reduced water quality were heavy rain, animal waste, system tests (possibly involving the water purifiers), oil spills/leakages, dredging, sewage, harmful algae.
Feature importances determining the "product class" (a number) of an air conditioner sold in Australia (from sample data) bit.ly/2y0nsr3. If I understood correctly, EER and COP are ratios related to cooling and heating efficiencies. For instance, Mitsubishi SRK20ZSXA-W had EERtestAvg of 6.4373 and COPtestAvg of 5.9745 (ranked first). From the result we see that in this case physical depth of the air conditioner seemed to be slightly more important than EERtestAvg in determining the product class. Could it be that greater depth improves the performance of the device? Width was the least important from the three dimensions and EER may have been collected inconsistently.
You probably remember how beautiful variable-width lines can be bit.ly/2y8Pnp9
When most inventors lived (according to Wikipedia) bit.ly/2kXcadU. The years between 1920 and 1930 look interesting. Note that this diagram is mostly about the past and tells nothing about the future. The data may also be incomplete, omitting some notable names. Now, we could go further and develop a graph of the connections among the inventors who lived around 1930 to see how many of them knew each other and how this has influenced their work.
Electricity used in the residential sector in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (1990 - 2015) bit.ly/2xZBjxP (Source: "Open data Newfoundland and Labrador")
Locations with highest cumulative amounts from parking tickets in Regina, Canada (03.01.2006 - 05.06.2016) bit.ly/2l0QsG5 (Source: City of Regina, "Parking services – outstanding parking tickets", bit.ly/2xYnvDM). Google thinks that "U of R" means University of Regina.
Annual program attendance and total circulation in Ontario libraries, 2016 bit.ly/2l0gSaH (Source: "Ontario public library statistics", bit.ly/2BUa2gU)
Median household income and median gross rent in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2008 - 2015) bit.ly/2kW7XXU (Source: Milwaukee Open Data, "Economic data")
Libraries in Tampa, Florida bit.ly/2l0nRAu
Total program attendance by age group at the Memphis Public Library (01.07.2014 - 01.04.2018) bit.ly/2xZNGdq. The number of young entrepreneurs is increasing.
Selected Texas performance indicators bit.ly/2kZydRl. Uses data from the Texas regional economic snapshots.
"All-in" programming does not help much, because once that "all" is changed, you have to start once again at position zero (like when the syntax gets changed). Exactly what happened to me years ago with JavaScript 6+. This was the red light to start becoming much more well-rounded rather than investing all my time in a single technology, always chasing (but being unable to catch) the latest developments. Since then I also follow the "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" rule. And if someone asks me to use specific frameworks, I view this as an extra.
Strange question, but do you believe that working with/on materials (wood, plastics, silicates, concrete) could be connected with higher PM2.5 emissions?
Feature correlation, Toronto economics 2011 bit.ly/2kVHfyC. More businesses looks highly correlated with higher local employment. Higher home prices seems moderately corelated to higher debt risk scores. The same type of diagram, related to transportation bit.ly/2y3BmZQ, shows that the more stops there are, the more road kilometers one might expect. The road kilometers themselves were well correlated (0.78) with increased number of traffic collisions.
Three locations in Toronto linked with high collected parking fines in 2016 bit.ly/2xTwmXv. While looking for their geocoordinates, I didn't expect that a zoom on the map will show some cars parked nearby. Ah, well. The second location registered the highest number of parking tickets (9 x 40 each).
Toronto city wards, said to become effective at 01.12.2018 bit.ly/2sUavJF
Electricity and gas usage at half-hour intervals in 38 schools in Dundee, Scotland (12.03.2016 - 12.03.2018) bit.ly/2xV6xX4 (data: Dundee City Council, bit.ly/2kZkkmg). All values on the y axes are given in kWh, where the value in each thirty-minute bin is the median of all values in all days for that hour. Orange describes the first year of the study while blue—the second. As this is a lot of data, you might question whether it is appropriate to see it all at once. For exploratory reasons, when we look for better understanding first, we may choose to look at the overall pattern (no matter how large) from a distance. This in itself could show an interesting pattern on which we can then narrow down. In our case, we see that 5-6 schools are using the most electricity, approaching a median of 100kW per hour. Similarly, 4-5 schools are using the most gas, approaching a median of 200kW per hour (probably an equivalent). Once we know this, we can filter out schools that appear less interesting and focus on telling an engaging story about the rest. We could look for behaviors by the hour or seek to relate the data to actions that were taken by the time. It is rare to see such logging effort that is broadly inclusive and deeply detailed at the same time. A sufficient reason to give credit to the organizers here.
Street lights in Dundee, Scotland bit.ly/2xS5oiZ (source: Dundee City Council, bit.ly/2xXmjAG). Shows only the lamps with known or easily extractible wattage, where a bigger point size represents higher wattage. Although somewhat hard to see, there are some areas with higher requirements. The total wattage of the lamps shown here is 1.644MW.
Having a subset of many parameters that are repeatedly passed to the same function in a tight loop may not be optimal. If there was a way to define them once outside the loop and then reuse the definition on each function call, this could reduce the communication needs. Learned about rcParams, but in my case I had parameters which had no equivalent key in this dictionary. Which unfortunately brought me back to the inefficient, but at least tried and tested approach.
Motor vehicle accidents in Hartford, Connecticut since 2005 bit.ly/2sSg8rM. This shows the data touched upon in the last bit, the approach having both positives and drawbacks. Using PIL with some manual scaling and custom functions to interpolate between colors (here blue for events far in the past and red for more recent events), it takes less than a minute to draw all points (compared to the previously estimated three hours). The drawback is that the points are fully opaque, so the red ones overlap most of the blue ones. I chose to plot in event date order, which gives most recent events an unfair visual advantage.
Suppose that you saw data on vehicle accidents and had the idea to show their locations using color to encode their recency. Showing all points if they had the same style would require a single function call, which would be almost immediate; showing per-point colors seems to require many function calls, which can sometimes become slow. You run the code, but it never ends. You then look more carefully: there are 88359 events. This does not seem too much, so what could be wrong? You decide to inspect the behavior of your plotting library (Matplotlib or something else) on your machine, resetting a performance counter every time a batch of 1000 points has been plotted, logging the time this took. You plot the number of points processed so far against the time and see the following diagram bit.ly/2kXQL4e. After 39000 points you notice that adding 1000 more took more than 100 seconds, equivalent to less than 10 points/sec. Yet, at that time there are still 48000 points more to plot! You try to estimate the total time instead, using ridge regression on the data you just generated, optimistically assuming preservation of linearity at scale. It tells you that coming from 87000 to 88000 points would take additional 227.48 seconds (4.39 points/sec). At the end you sum all times observed and all times predicted in the whole interval after that, keeping the 1000 increment. You divide by 3600 and come to ≈2.815 hours. Whether the result could be so beautiful as to justify 3 hours spent on it (the show function also takes time), is something everyone has to decide for themselves. At least we saw how slow plotting can be; improving the time it takes, especially at scale, could add significant value.
Some performance indicators of library branches in Boulder, Colorado (01.01.2014 - 01.12.2017) bit.ly/2xSCzTr
Drinking fountains in Vancouver, Canada bit.ly/2kYIPQm. In case it is hot outside and you need some refreshing options.
Libraries in San Antonio, TX bit.ly/2kZSJ4p. Made in a hurry and it shows.
A short path passing through many universities in Germany bit.ly/2sNxGFC. I suspect that some universities are missing, which is why I am not using the word "shortest". The initial idea was to create a minimum spanning tree.
Information about some provinces in Italy bit.ly/2kVCN32. There are over hundred provinces, so I could not capture them all on my small screen while still having their labels visible. Used data from Wikipedia bit.ly/2xM3pfY.
A small fraction of the buildings in Linz, Austria bit.ly/2xQOcKz (Source: CC-BY-3.0: Stadt Linz - data.linz.gv.at). There is also a TIFF file weighting over 320MB in case someone is willing to print the map of Linz. Not sure whether printers would handle an image of such size without problems.
Trees in Grenoble, France bit.ly/2sR5bqG
Food hygiene ratings of some businesses in Camden, UK (02.01.2010 - 31.10.2017) bit.ly/2sNbMlA. The Food Standards Agency has given high marks to most businesses in all four criteria: hygiene score, structural score, confidence in management score and rating value. Taking away the rating score, structural score tends to be highest, followed by the confidence in management score and the hygiene score. Red points indicate high scores, blue points refer to low scores.
Available parking spaces yesterday night in Camden, UK bit.ly/2JgeOu0. Higher availability can be seen in the North, lower in the South. Observe what happens at latitude of 51.53.
Soft drink consumption in the UK (2010 - 2015) bit.ly/2JdJV9i. Good to see more people switching to bottled water instead of carbonates and dilutables (the two top categories by the time). Coca-Cola is probably the most well-known carbonate brand; Step is one of the few dilutables I know about. For some reason, the consumption of fruit juices (said to contain "100% fruit") has slightly declined, while that of energy drinks has increased. The first column shows in absolute terms that people consumed almost twice as much carbonates as bottled water.
Already saw several interactive walkthroughs of buildings that were quite impressive. Thinking about whether the hotel industry wouldn't also benefit from them—by letting people look before they book. My services don't offer such level of interactivity, but I noticed on several occassions a minor, yet annoying detail when the smooth animations finished at a static Youtube video, waiting for a click to proceed. Not only did the Youtube logo appear very different in that context (inside a video about a building), but also the fact that one video was waiting on another. Not natural to a viewer; less smooth transitions between the stories. This decision could have been made to reduce the load time (longer videos are heavier), but the experience becomes a sequence of discrete events rather than continuously smooth.
Seeing formulas defined in natural language instead of one-letter variables or numbers helps me understand them more easily. Now, if I need the variables or the numbers, these are easy to substitute. But in case of one-letter variables, these have to be first used and then defined, so the eye has to scan them twice, which until recently I didn't perceive as a possible inefficiency.
Some companies invest in lots of books, which on the surface might seem great. I also like reading a lot, but sometimes I also think more critically. Such investing may be a good way to "amortize" the high cost of acquiring and spreading the skills necessary to do the job without having to pay each employee for the effort to acquire them themselves. What this achieves is demoralizing the employees and telling them that their effort doesn't matter. Here are your books, now you are aware how little you know, so better stay silent about your salary. This "convincing and conditioning" strategy (others always know more than you) could be, I believe, the major trigger for the decline of most companies in the future. Not AI, robotics, cryptocurrencies or chatbots. Until we learn to live together and start investing in people in the way that is required to see them grow, it is not realistic to believe that the clouds over the global economy will magically dissolve themselves.
A roof made of tiles that are a bigger version of keyboard keys looks creative. The slope is still preserved for good ergonomy. And that tile size likely makes the typing of a giant even easier. Cannot possibly think of the kind of remains to be found between the keys.
Have you seen the "cigarette cards" in the NYPL digital collection? on.nypl.org/2sLoRMx. I like the colors and consistency across all the cards showing animals. Reminds me that each collection of stamps I have seen had its own distinct style.
Wondering whether the owners of some carpet stores thought about placing photos online as an alternative of waiting for a client to come in person and spend a lot of time digging in the piles. My guess is that revealing the designs is not an option; otherwise it would be enough to have the them "be" the web design.
A hierarchical sunburst diagram can be made with D3 bit.ly/2sGXIu5
Food product annotation with the help of some SVG bit.ly/2Hpbvuv
Area of polygon by the shoelace formula bit.ly/2kQSYi7. Good that it seems to eliminate the step of manually subdividing the n-gon into triangular pieces, seeking their individual areas (Heron) and their total sum.
Power against cubic centimers for the vehicles from the New Zealand's fleet for 2018 bit.ly/2sHOhux (source: bit.ly/2Hk7YOc). Had to clean up the data a bit, because many vehicles were given with either zero power or zero cubic centimeters. But it is still mysterious that some vehicles with a power rating of over 700 have a very low cubic centimeter rating (these may be noise). The two most common car models in the fleet are Ford Ranger and Toyota Hilux. After the cleanup, the correlation coefficient between the two features comes at 0.6935. Another not immediately obvious way to relate the features of a car would be to use a parallel coordinates diagram as seen in this case bit.ly/2sJiJEn as long as the number of models is kept reasonable.
Footfall at various locations and times in York, UK (30.03.2009 - 28.05.2018) bit.ly/2JaXh6m. Once again uses data from the Business Intelligence Hub of the City of York Council. Coney Street seems to register a small, gradual decline in the number of people passing by. Unsure whether Parliament Street at M&S and Parliament Street are one and the same thing, especially when the two pictures show signs of being able to be merged.
Room occupancy and average room rate in York, UK (01.04.2010 - 30.11.2017) bit.ly/2JeRixz. Prices seem to have moved up a little at the end of the previous year. The average price for the entire period came at 82.46 £, while in July 2017 a maximum of 115.09 £ was reached.
Monthly container throughput, Singapore bit.ly/2sGXvH4
Was not aware that vectors with known start, length and angle can be clustered similarly to points (optical flow).
If you also experienced the problem of being unable to export your database schema from MySQLWorkbench (at least on 6.3.6, cannot speak about the latest version), it is perhaps a good idea to try this on the command line with mysqldump. I tend to forget that MySQL isn't limited to a visual, administrative interface. Forgetting about the command line in that case left my databases empty for far too long. Yes, I very much like SQLite and can use that one too, but sometimes I prefer a client-server model instead of having to deal with a physically generated file, which is not that easy to hide.
Still astonished to look at DevTools and see that pages which used to take 400ms per request now take 150ms. In case you are using a platform like the browser, you will perhaps see your code become faster over time without being actively engaged with it. This is fascinating. Only if the quality of my code could improve faster than the quality of the platform...
Sometimes, if you spend five more seconds on proper database design, you can save on some computation time taking the form of if statements.
Starting the week with a simple page dedicated to the idea of reducing the number of unused buildings and machines bit.ly/2sDTQdo. If you find it valuable, feel free to use it. No registration required.
Distance between point and line bit.ly/2sChVB0, hopefully without a mistake.
"Public humiliation is always a demonstration of power" — from the latest issue of the Max Planck research magazine. Very well said, which is why it does not have place in our society. Unfortunately, some people at managing positions still believe they have the right to humiliate/shame others. Not surprising why their companies can't find employees and why the ones who stay, see and silently support this practice quickly lose their connection with the leaving.
Wrote a small script to parse the top Energy Star refrigerators for 2018 and rank them according to a custom criteria bit.ly/2J5mhfp. Contains a lot of text. Notice how models of the same brand often appear close together.
An interesting diagram bit.ly/2Hd5cKz indicating that the smallest PV installation may not be connected with the lowest cost per watt. In this case, we see that 8-10kW systems had significantly lower price than 2-4kW systems (in 2014). Beyond that point, not much gains were to be realized.
Took some families of microcontrollers from Texas Instruments and compared their characteristics min RX current and max throughput bit.ly/2sA6w4G. Found it eye-opening that during data reception one microcontroller was said to use a minimum current of 1.8mA (assuming consistency of measurements), which my guess is, greatly extends the battery life. A maximal throughput of 5Mbps is equivalent to 625 KB/s, but it would have been interesting to see the current at this rate. Always wanted to find time to look deeper into what makes a microcontroller good and eventually look into whether I could program one. Still, the number of available options can seem overwhelming for a beginner, especially without having some way to filter them. Yesterday, I saw an issue of AnalogDialogue where ultra-low power microcontrollers were said to use current in the range of 30-40µA/Mhz and thought about how great this metric (I never heard about) is.
Number of rainy days at the Changi climate station in Singapore (01.1982 - 03.2018) and prediction for June 2018 bit.ly/2H8NQ1r. We'll see by how much this number will deviate from the truth (and then update the model).
Good work costs good amount of money and if a client is unable to recognize this, we will part our ways very soon.
Appropriate air flow in a concrete example bit.ly/2H6X4LL. Please, note that I am not a specialist on the topic, but simply use the information I find and what I observe.
In a freely available report, mass.gov created a diagram describing the opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts (2000 - 2017) bit.ly/2IVClzZ. The increase after 2010 does not seem ordinary. Even with the small decline in 2017, it still comes at 370% relative to 2010. But it's not only this state which is experiencing the problem bit.ly/2H1ifyN. Another report on.ny.gov/2sowFU9 shows that opioid-related painkillers are linked to more deaths than heroin, which I found stunning.
"In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous." - Leonardo da Vinci. Interesting that this applies to the nature of good programming practices as well.
Transport for London has this application showing the bike stations close to gardens of touristic interest bit.ly/2H0HEZf. What I like is that the points appear with some delay only when the user has spend time looking at the nearby text. This effectively masks the load time by giving alternative content to look at. What I slightly dislike is the delay that occurs after clicking a point—it can take 3-4 seconds to load the name of the station and its current utilization. This is partially understandable due to the large number of points, but improving responsiveness may still be possible. Additionally, showing all stations with the same marker causes the distinct information to be kept at a click distance instead of being more immediate.
If someone uploads a personal photo and images of the clothes in their wardrobe, the algorithm should be able to help them (at least in theory) choose the clothing pieces that would create the best overall styles, ranked. Accounting for body proportions, skin color, eye color, hair style, hair color, accessories, maybe even previously rated images of outfits. Could reduce the time people spend in front of a mirror, in search of the right combination. Or the chance of combining blue shirt with red hat and green glasses.
Beautiful and useful are necessary characteristics of almost any work that has to appear publicly. Something is missing when either of the two is missing. You would probably agree that style transfer is an amazing technique, but it is unclear how useful it is. Simply creating beautiful images, neglecting the fact how and in which contexts they can be used meaningfully marks the end of an otherwise interesting idea.
I like how detailed the data about the restaurants in Nice, France is. Beside name, street address and geocoordinates, there is information about phone and fax, email, website, list of services, list of amenities (public parking, air conditioning, WiFi, animal-friendly, terrace etc.), atmosphere (Jazz, Latino, Lounge etc.), languages (which likely the staff understands), opening hours, capacity (broken down by group, indoor, outdoor and total), number of rooms (if available), supported payment methods. Really helpful to someone willing to invest the time to create a high-utility application. Not only that, but it also sets a very positive example about the possible dimensions existing open data can be further infused with.
Ridge regression (assuming a linear model) on energy intensity data of European countries and some other regions to see how much it deviates from the data given for the world bit.ly/2GXRFGN. Also tried gradient boosting regression, but in this case it comes very close to the straight line. If you wonder to which country the points with a growing trend belong—they refer to the Middle East region.
Do you think there could be some tendency in the way big corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft choose the locations of their offices? Using data from their websites and some geocoordinates (if correct), we can construct the following diagram representing the current situation bit.ly/2kxkgtC
Realized that I haven't visited the sites of motherboard makers like ASUS and Gigabyte for years. Looked around to compare features of their latest mainboards to learn what is new and newer. What I saw instead made me let go of this idea quickly. The features were hidden behind 1) long descriptions, 2) images and clever marketing messages (Unleash your dreams...), 3) (gaming) optics and plenty of shining lights. Sad to see that they worked hard to leave the impression that the motherboard must be a gaming board. Then remembered why this might be the case. If you heard about the rewards given at some gaming competitions, you would start pulling your hair asking yourself why there aren't such rewards in science. It should then come as no surprise: what the world appreciates most, it gets more from it. Gamers, bitcoin miners and social media experts.
Nutrient composition of four rice grain types as median values across selected EU countries bit.ly/2sjaazN. It seems that the positives I've heard about brown rice are not unfounded. Also tried to create covariance matrices between the features observed in each country bit.ly/2shGNhr, but the results look unlike other covariance matrices I have seen.
If you want me to do something specific for you, this has its price.
Someone said that the mark of a vibrant city is the extent to which its inhabitants perceive the problems as their own and act on them. Here is what people in Dublin report once they notice problems on the streets bit.ly/2kvVJVM. Does not include all submissions, but still gives an overview.
Crime by type in Little Rock for 2017 bit.ly/2sialvv. Didn't expect to see so many cases in such a small city.
A small effect of having a big, always visible, two-level horizontal navigation, followed by a body, at the bottom of which a horizontally spanned ad is shown and another footer below it, is that when looking on a small screen, this site appars as a collection of five patches of approximately equal height. You may need some "guessing time" to tell which patch belongs to the content.
A store locator can start with an "uncalibrated" map, asking the user to drag and zoom around to find markers to click on (a challenge on a small screen). After the click, it may take one second for the spinner to show up and additional 2-3 seconds to retrieve the address of the branch. If someone clicked on three markers, they have spent 10 seconds in waiting. Information should be made conveniently accessible and searchable, not hidden behind popups and clever navigation patterns.
Many map services start by showing a view close to the current location. I wonder how appropriate it is to load the same content every time without even asking the user. I would prefer starting from an empty screen, providing the right input to obtain the right information (also the approach seen on this site). Did this app just made me wait for something I never asked for?
Implementing the Kesteleyn formula in very little code is well possible. That it doesn't give the same result on a sample input as presented by the author who introduced it, is slightly dissatisfying. Whenever you can, check the validity of the claims you encounter.
Are there any products you used recently and were very satisfied with? Which ones? Did they do something differently that you found more engaging?
Coordinates of vehicle stops in Denver which were connected with arrests bit.ly/2kq3AE9
Libraries in Wellington, New Zealand bit.ly/2seKWCC
"Cities with highest average salaries after taxes for workers" bit.ly/2seBcbw. Based on an article in BusinessInsider.
Learning from Boston's CityScore bit.ly/2IJnadc. The label case and spacing as well as the diagram size aren't perfect here (trade-offs).
Noticed something interesting about the top buildings with the highest 2016 source EUI in San Francisco (lower is better) bit.ly/2koNWsM. The median value for all buildings comes at 119.9, where seven of them exceed an EUI threshold of 1000.
UK house price index for London and its boroughs bit.ly/2kqdeqj
Bicycle hires in London bit.ly/2GOK8d9 (Source: Transport for London bit.ly/2GOhyJ3). The line going down at the end of the third plot indicates that 2018 is still in progress.
You may remember one of my old attempts to build a radar chart with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (for draggable points along the dimensions). This didn't work quite well. Here is another radar chart, this time slightly more "scientific", but non-interactive bit.ly/2saP0nC
Greenhouse gas emissions for 15-50 MPG cars bit.ly/2s71SLi. Used several data bits from the given site to compile this. Since Hyundai Ioniq, Toyota Prius Prime and Tesla model 3 were all said to have MPG >= 130, I wanted to span the curve until there, but the few available data points made it impossible to escape overfitting (at least with common methods).
Metro stations in Melbourne and zoom on the closest five to the centroid bit.ly/2ILzxFu. People near the station "Tooronga" seem to have plenty of metro options.
Many years ago I avoided PDFs since their relative size was heavier than the websites I visited. Today the situation has changed: these documents are now much more lightweight than the average website. Additionally, once downloaded, no additional HTTP requests are needed, no bulky frameworks are downloaded, no hundred clicks are required to move from page to page, no advertisements or popups are shown, no video/audio is started automatically. The only downside is lack of interactivity. But if websites continue to grow in size, it is possible that more people start to ask about their PDF versions.
Levels of NO pollution at four locations in Bristol, UK (25.03.2018 - 24.04.2018) bit.ly/2IFMaC9 (data by Bristol City Council: bit.ly/2kk7Ipf). A boxplot diagram is also available bit.ly/2IIuJAK
Learned a small trick to estimate the number of dimensions needed to capture a given level of variance in the data, so I share the code along with the credits bit.ly/2s7P7QI. On a test image, it tells me that I need only 29 dimensions to capture 95% of the variance or 7 dimensions if I can live with 80%. Somehow reminds me of the need to determine the number of clusters (k) for k-means (see silhouette coefficient). Fairly useful. Also nice is PCA(n_components=0.95). Peviously I assumed that the number of dimensions must be at least one, but was unaware that this parameter in this context can be interpreted as variance too.
The outer product of three vectors is a cube-like tensor bit.ly/2klOfVg
Sometimes I download things to read later, which usually never comes. Turns out that the fall 2013 issue of INNOVATION magazine (by IDSA) had an article on Tesla model S, mentioning some design/engineering decisions. The battery pack was said to be positioned under the floor, while motor and gearbox were between the wheels. Stamped aluminium for the body to reduce weight; a single moving piece (the rotor) to reduce noise (for "studio-quality sound recordings"); suspension progressively lowering the car during acceleration to improve aerodynamics; optional third-row seating; on-screen control for sound/lighting adjustments and efficiency tracking; drag coefficient of 0.24. And the idea that better engineering of each small piece quickly leads to compound results. Good description for someone who never touched the steering wheel.
Simple pattern of squares and circle sectors bit.ly/2s4kRq4. Both use complementary black and white colors. The square size and the radius are adjustable to explore how they relate.
Wrote some code that slightly changed the image of a dahlia bit.ly/2kedMzA
Simple visualization of the dot product of two matrices bit.ly/2s8xBvY. Similarly, we can look at the structure of almost any matrix. For instance, if a matrix of weights is changing frequently, plotting each step may allow us to see the effects at each stage.
Well-designed floor plans are always a pleasure to look at, especially when the purpose of each room is clearly indicated, when there is an arrow pointing from the model to current photos/videos of this room and when the whole continues with information buyers need to know about and finishes with the appropriate contact coordinates. Still rare to see an offer that skillfully draws attention through design. But I can imagine that a great web/visual designer can help a lot with that.
A structure knows its name but still not its line fit bit.ly/2IDH2OK (code: bit.ly/2GHaFsC). Sometimes experimentation rewards with additional views bit.ly/2IEB7cs
Implementing the Hungarian method for optimal assignment was slightly harder than I thought. In particular, the striking of the zeros in the cost matrix with the minimum number of lines can be made in many different ways. (Then went to see an existing implementation on GitHub which had several screens of code.) Mine had only 1.5 screens (including all comments) before it became intricate. And it was only for simple one-to-one assignments. Despite of this, it is still useful to know the process and be able to apply it in practice when needed. Yesterday, I learned about another case for it: "assign each paper to each available reviewer". The input could potentially be a 100x100 cost matrix, but whether someone would bother to craft it by hand is another question.
Comparison of UK rail (National Rail) ticket prices for four selected routes bit.ly/2rZvSJc. Someone complained that the yearly ticket price between Brighton and London is expensive relative to the distance traveled, so I decided to take a look. Considering the distances between the cities (albeit on a straight line), this route shows very similar characteristics to other ones. What surprises is that currently it doesn't seem to matter much whether a ticket is for one, three or six months in terms of daily cost. This pricing scheme probably encourages people to switch to monthly or yearly tickets only. But while the difference between 7 and 30 days is small, the same cannot be said for the one between 30 and 360 days (for simplicity I assumed that each month has 30 days). The diagram shows very similar switching incentives for the two (irrespective of the route), which means that a monthly ticket could offer much more flexibility if you are ready to incur a small loss.
Still surprised to hear how many companies throw millions after people who don't help them grow, perhaps even contribute to their decline. Then they start looking for "better" employees which cost cents and wonder why they can't find them. Things don't work that way. Market conditions.
"Skills are always an issue. Getting top-class talent is never easy, but you can make it easier on yourself by going where the top talent is." Better to see it before you believe it. Actions speak louder than words.
Sample storyplot bit.ly/2rZhjFm
What is the current level of CPU utilization of your servers? A somewhat counterintuitive diagram consisting of two lines suggests that some servers can be less energy-efficient at low utilization. The power they use rises more slowly than the energy-efficiency they achieve with increasing utilization. We might think that less computation would reduce the overall energy use by a lot, while the actual effect could be much less pronounced. What decreases are both efficiency and utility since a server in an idle state is not adding much value. On the opposite, a fully utilized server can reach high efficiency and be used to create many new assets, while the increase in power usage may not be significant. (Please, feel free to verify this with your own servers and data.) Keeping utilization at around 80%, leaving 20% slack for unexpected events is perhaps a good way to balance against the possible interruptions from services executed in the background. Reminds me of the finding how some hotels regulate their used capacity at peak times—once it exceeds 80%, they start raising their prices to guarantee smooth operation. In short, having fully utilized servers may not be a bad idea if you have a steady queue of complex, high-value tasks you can assign to them.
Code showing that e^iπ = -1 bit.ly/2rZPeO6
You may remember an attempt to show the vacant parking places in Melbourne, Australia. Pleased to see that the data was made much more digestible and fresh (updates at regular intervals), which means that it can be easily converted to a demo. But since we see this when the local time there is said to be 02:20, it is not surprising that very few places are currently occupied.
Good to see how people in Helsinki tend to think about their libraries bit.ly/2rYQ4e4. The average of 12.36 books borrowed per year across 5.5 million readers tells about deeply ingrained reading habits—something that the new library may seek to leverage. What impresses are the photos of these well-organized places, having many small-sized bookshelves. I cannot imagine that every possible book is available there and wouldn't be surprised if they use data analysis to find out which books to load instead of trying to keep all of them—no matter how old or dusty,—in a single building, which is hard to manage. Sad to hear that so many libraries have closed in England since 2010.
Enjoyed the excerpts from the books "Bayesian data analysis" and "Applied predictive modeling". Both seem to be well-written, but the full texts could give some wider and more useful context.
Connections between determinant, rank and inverse of a matrix bit.ly/2k8hY3O
"My convex skull hurts" might be a sign that you are a programmer with a headache.
Applying non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) on an image bit.ly/2rU8Fbf with the idea to associate basis vectors and their weights. Here four components were used. In the resulting image we can see that some areas are much brighter/darker than others, which leads to a less harmonious result. A viewer who is scrolling around, would first perceive the highlights before they reason about the subject in the image.
If you also saw grids of images with oriented lines having white and black and wondered how they were obtained from an image, independent component analysis (ICA) applied on the patches seems to be one way. PyDeep even shows an example of this.
Finished reading the IPOL's paper "The noise clinic: a blind image denosing algorithm" and thoroughly enjoyed it. Since real-world data is often noisy, I can imagine it could be a good pre-processing step to improve the quality of images before they appear online or in publications. Observing the difference images allows to directly see the effect of the algorithm.
Looking back, almost eight days have passed since I mentioned my issue of being unable to plot with matplotlib. Today, you released another update and after installing it, my issue magically disappeared. Words can't describe how grateful I am to you.
If you heard how many different contexts the word "publishing" can have for a library and the heroic effort required to manage everything on a "squeezed" budget, would you think of the need of an International Library Day? I see libraries as a complement to the web and I think we should maintain/expand their heritage the same way we push for an open web, never taking both for granted. Possibly explains why the coordinates of so many libraries were included here in the past. And I still believe that the search within the catalogs of many libraries can be improved.
Saw a statue of a thinking programmer in front of his laptop in an article on reflective practice. He probably realized that he can't make himself forever through his work and asked a colleague to cover him with molten metal instead.
"Success is determined less by what you know than by who you know." Consider why you are unable to speak with me then.
Derive fruit prices from fruit mix prices bit.ly/2rKsTnE
Suppose you have a limited energy budget for movements. Where would you go? Would you reach your planned destination? Is there a sufficient reward that will enable the next move to explore the space or will you get stuck, fully exhausted? This thinking might help you the next time you find yourself rushing mindlessly through the day. The more energy you are ready to burn through to obtain a small reward (relative and computable), the easier it will be for others to manipulate you. Better to conserve it and use it when it brings you the most and when this provides you with some more to keep going.
Showing a bipartite graph with many nodes on both sides and a single edge between the two groups is a fairly creative way to describe the rarity of true love through a simple and expressive graphic.
Not available on any time frame. If you've made plans to communicate with me "later" and "in case if", better don't start. I am not your substitute.
When as a tech company you organize a conference on which internal employees greatly outnumber external visitors, do not expect to hear a lot of questions/criticism. That's convenient since you can then go to great lengths to explain how "grand" your products are. Someone might even believe that.
Have you checked the Flesch-Kincaid readability score of your ten-screens long article discussing pets and puppets? Höchste Zeit.
Sometimes I create diagrams from articles. Finished reading one, which mentioned that the production of 1MW electricity takes 345kg plastic junk, but only 132kg natural gas. The former releases 880kg CO₂; the latter—360kg. Could have been a matplotlib diagram.
Getting rid of old papers is much harder than accumulating them. You have to go through each one to ensure that you are no deleting anything that would support the "not knowing what you are not knowing" case. Takes time.
The answer to this question bit.ly/2rESezt might be rooted in the way one wants to be perceived. Many people who go to theater tend to appreciate culture or simply want others to associate them with it. But imagine a performer who is trying to do their best to entertain the audience—how would they feel midst yawning/sleeping people? How could they possibly understand whether their performance is good when they are receiving no feedback? Sleeping during a performance when there is no physical tiredness or precondition that necessitates it is an act of disrespect towards the work of the performer. It is almost symbolic, because at a place that is attempting to sow the seed of culture, lack of culture is being tolerated. Therefore, I would understand if the performers went to their audience and politely asked them to leave, assuring them that they would receive their money back. Not every performance has to be for everyone.
Reminds me of the words that whenever someone writes a book or creates a music piece, their work is at some point done, whereas the work of the software developer is rarely ever done (and especially so in the case of using dependencies).
Deutsche Bahn slightly changed one of its pages and as a result the demo page relying on the IC bus prices had missing data and a broken layout. This should be fixed now (at least temporarily), but as always, if you notice problems, let me know and I will try my best to resolve them. Many eyes see much better than two.
I was wondering once why I was reading a math book, which was hard to understand, when the shocking thought came to me that math could be used to prevent computation. If a result is known in advance or can be derived on paper, then the loop that would be used to generate it, can be safely eliminated. And if the result is unknown, but doesn't change between executions, then computing it once and replacing the loop with it would save the repeated execution on each request of the code. Was not exactly improving my math skills.
If I raise 6 to powers bigger than one and then sum the digits until I come at a single one, the result always seems to be 9 (6^2=36, 3+6=9; 6^3=216, 2+1+6=9; 6^4=1296, 1+2+9+6=18, 1+8=9; 6^5=7776, 7+7+7+6=27, 2+7=9; 6^10=60466176, 6+0+4+6+6+1+7+6=36, 3+6=9...). 9 is just a reversed 6, right?
Electronics also seems to have a lot in common with programming. The need for careful design of the architecture, component selection, the choices about the component characteristics, the sequence of connections (inputs and outputs) hint about this. In addition, speed of the circuit may also be important where memory modules enable the access to data. The interface hides the complexity behind a black box to ease the use of the device while not bothering anyone with irrelevant details. Optionally, the user can toggle the desired functionality, see feedback on a small screen or input data on a specialized keyboard. In programming we often keep the size of the code small to ease maintenance; in electronics this translates to miniaturization of the components, minimization of the interconnection path lengths and optimization of the total board area. Increased power-efficiency due to reduced current/voltage enable better designed circuits to operate longer, potentially reducing strain on the battery/supercapacitor. Therefore my guess is that working on electronics projects could help us become better programmers (in some non-obvious ways).
Chord diagram bit.ly/2rACCwQ
Matrices find so many and diverse applications. As I learned recently, they can describe even the pattern of yarns running along a fabric. But in cases where plotting is unavailable (suppose that your matplotlib is also broken), understanding a matrix by looking at the numbers can become relatively hard. And I still believe that some important techniques are still missing/unavailable. From web design, we know that if a technology is not available, a fallback must ensure that the content is still accessible. With a matrix, its numbers are the content, but unless we visualize them, we have only a vague understanding of the context. Even a color blind person should be able to tell the specifics of the structure of the matrix, the available relationships and similarities. Maybe even get a "numeric heatmap" as a fallback to the visualization. It is unrealistic to believe that with dimensionality reduction, spectral analysis, correlation/covariance, matrix factorization / decomposition, several statistical methods and others we have fully exhausted our ability to learn from a matrix. And if we fail to learn at a basic level or develop more methods that enable it, we can expect to understand even less once the computational complexity increases (which is already the case with neural network variants). When we see a matrix of moderate dimensionality, it is helpful to ask ourselves what percentage of it we understand from the context and what potential knowledge we might be discarding by seeking a convenient reduction capturing the maximal variance.
Multiple paths over the pixels in an image can selectively preserve image detail, where the rest can be set to the background color of the context. Given enough visible pixels, this allows images to appear nonrectangular while at the same time using the viewer's ability to derive the missing details. An interesting question is what the minimum number of pixels could be that allows the image subjects to be properly recognized. And which pixels are more important than the rest.
A piece of me engaged in unsolicited word play: microscope over horoscope = horror #funnyfriday
NREL has published some very informative stacked bar charts describing the cost of solar PV installations in the years after 2010. From what I saw, it seems that in all sectors (residential, commercial, utility-scale) the cost is decreasing not linearly, but exponentially.
Blue whirl bit.ly/2I96USk
A short brainstorming session about the possible nature of edges in graphs bit.ly/2rz27hZ. Slightly unreadable.
Joint probability of a sample Bayesian network bit.ly/2I2IdHb using another one as a reference. Although a useful model, we rarely have knowledge about all probabilities, so deriving an accurate end result may be hard. Created with LibreOffice Draw.
The results obtained by various image segmentation methods (mean shift, normalized cuts, convolutional segmentation nets) are often fascinating, especially when the parts of the whole object are colorized using a harmoniuos palette.
If you have an image of a cat looking at the camera and you use SIFT for feature extraction using red points (not great), you could get the red-eye effect for free.
I wanted to try illustrating with code that the product of multiple Gaussians is a Gaussian (idea said to be used in the Kalman filter) when this error happened. Now describing it in words only.
After updating some packages, I noticed that matplotlib stopped working on my machine, showing the following error message bit.ly/2I758Ba. Installing python3-tk as suggested did not help. It seems that other people had this problem in the past too, but none of the suggestions worked. Still wondering what could be wrong.
There were few instances where I started working on a demo just to find out that I already reached that goal in the past. Have you experienced the same problem? The disadvantage of completing many things is that the search time to verify that you don't repeat yourself starts to take longer.
Serving people who are losing real money tends to be easier. If they wouldn't seek help, their losses might increase. Payment is then not much of an issue, due to the realization that it is the lesser evil. Then the willingness to collaborate and respect naturally comes. If someone isn't seeking your services, they may either not have a real problem or not care much about the quality of the solution.
It is worth remembering that long-term employment at below market average salary is preparing the degradation of your skills. Simply because other people who get paid meanwhile will have more resources to gain advantage and prepare for the future better than you will be able with lots of effort from a low starting point. Additionally, the capacity to bring more effort isn't infinite or forever.
Impressive how fast the living standard in China is improving. According to an article in "Zeit", the average salary in the countryside is already ≈1600 Euro, while in the cities it comes at ≈4350 Euro, if we preserve the same conversion rate. Only 5-10 years ago some people in Europe were laughing over the low standard in this country, but now, it seems, the roles have changed. If the numbers are correct, the average salary in China's cities (unclear how many) already exceeds the equivalent one in the top 40 US cities as of Q3 2017 (≈4380$) and approaches the averages observed in the top 5th US city. Interesting times.
Have you noticed the average cost of providing your service the past week/month? Was the service worth it?
"For a 486 PC with 4MB RAM, the largest network that can be used is 13000 nodes and 50000 arcs without road names loaded in." My CD-ROM can't even get how this was possible. Excites me much more than reading a paper about a medium sized problem (possibly solvable on a laptop), where the machine setup included 128GB of memory or more.
No respect means no work from me. It is something that I tend to check very early and repeatedly and where many of you have failed before. In this case, it is clear that you also lose the chance to communicate with me.
Quite amazing to see parallel coordinates visualization which doesn't use lines as boundaries, but circles/polygons, rotated in 3D, where the lines move between them. Sometimes visualization seems inexhaustible, especially when you combine multiple related concepts. Also interesting to see a scatterplot with consistently-sized (space-efficient), enumerated points, on the right of which a bar chart is located, which adds a "depth" dimension to each point, while still using clear 2D graphics for both. I won't discuss the third idea, because eventually it might appear in a demo if I find the time and stamina for it.
Wavelet transform of a sequence bit.ly/2rhTRTq
Weighted median filter of length 11 bit.ly/2HGAH4K
Utilization of shelters for homeless people in Toronto, Canada (01.01.2018 - 01.05.2018) bit.ly/2rjpoVl. Most shelters seem to be reaching their full capacities. Some of them report strange numbers (e.g. capacity lower than occupancy). (Occupancy is shown in blue, while capacity is in red.) Some shelters, two of which are for families (Birkdale Residence Motel, COSTI Edward Hotel) and one that seems more generally available (COSTI Radisson Hotel), have expanded their capacities this year, but the demand at these places increased accordingly. A bandwidth in red indicates that the capacity fluctuates or alternates on subsequent days. It could be that one day (when capacity is reduced) is used to organize an event to enable the increased capacity on the next, but this is only an assumption. The capacity of S.A. Maxwell Meighen Centre seems to fluctuate the most.
Some people can't truly comprehend what it means when you tell them that someone is ill and can't speak with them on the phone. They continue ringing the entire morning as if no rule is valid for them. That's cheeky and further convinces me that not having a phone myself was the right choice. Better to not allow random callers and promoters to distract me. Feeling subscribed to a device everytime I can't limit certain calls.
Comparison of theoretical signal loss at 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies, depending on the distance from the access point (excluding external influence) bit.ly/2HEJzIf. Made this primarily for myself to convert an interesting formula into something I can more easily comprehend. No guarantee of correctness.
Used to commute to one of my previous jobs for 75-90mins (in the one direction). Almost a year later I felt physically exhausted (in line with the previous graphic) and dissatisfied with my learning and earning rates. Then I asked for a pay raise, believing that it could partially heal at least one of the side effects. After waiting a couple of days and still having no response, it became clear that the time to leave has come. Since I came there with the help of an intermediary firm, it was not hard to suspect that they were looking for a cheap, not necessarily qualified employee. And so, out of dissatisfaction with the existing opportunities, dummerAugust was born.
Came to an interesting graphic in "Why sleep matters: The economic costs of insufficient sleep" by RAND Europe, which highlights some of the factors affecting sleep loss bit.ly/2HCydnR. "Financial concerns" ranks at the second place; worrying about money on a daily basis seems to make people progressively more tired and unproductive at work (see the meaning of "presenteeism"). Another reason to ask your employer/clients to pay fairly, according to your expectations and not simply serve mechanically and in fear of using your own voice.
As a client you have some important superpowers. You can ask your designer/programmer how they obtained a particular result to see whether they have a good understanding of the process. You can ask to learn more about an aspect of it (something small, but specific) to see whether the explanation of what they did seems reasonable. This shows that you are not only interested in the final result, but also whether it was produced specifically for you or copied from somewhere else. If you know what the difference between novel and copied work is in terms of effort required and you find that equal compensation for both is unfair, you make yourself a much more desirable client. Your designer/programmer will also look at you differently the next time. Otherwise, as a client you may be sponsoring the "copy-paste" practice, which affects the willingness of the people who work hard to continue doing it. Anyone can run an automated bot today, download any online content and call it their own. Anyone can use a content generator or CMS and claim they were "hand-crafting" your site. When in doubt, ask the person you are working with to do their work in front of you.
Still checking my work multiple times in the full knowledge that this slows me down and out of fear how I might see myself after the fact. Some corrections I've made helped to avoid a couple of serious mistakes. When you try to work fast, you also tend to make lots of mistakes. But what repeatedly worked for me was staying with the task for a while and developing intuition about it. Then it was this intuition that was telling me I was wrong once I saw the result.
"Tracking mouse cursors provides new ways to understand visitors and their needs." I can agree with this only when it is a limited-time, pre-launch experiment used with a small control group representative of the entire user base. But I would disagree when it is used for universal spying of people's actions, becoming part of the business for no good reason. If you find yourself tracking cursors or even keystrokes, stop for a while and evaluate what you are doing. Dynamic forms of tracking are especially harmful when they cause people to avoid certain sites and become more wary of new services.
If you don't have time to discuss your project or have no idea how to organize your thoughts, you won't find a solution.
Very often I see papers where a variable is discussed early and it is expected that by the time it is used in a formula the reader already knows and remembers what it was about. Found an example bit.ly/2qWbF6C that is free of assumptions, which reminds me what good design was about. An alternative to using a single sentence (which saves space, but is somewhat harder to read) would be a format "variable - meaning", each variable being on a separate line. If after re-reading your paper you find that your formula looks like a meaningless collection of letters and symbols, please take a moment to see it from the perspective of your reader.
Sometimes work receives an additional, ethical dimension. Suppose you are frequently paid on time, but your client is unable to fully take advantage of your product. What would you do if they insist on "trying harder", paying repeatedly in the meantime? It could feel that you are doing half the work, yet taking full advantage of the situation. How often would you be willing to do that? Would you try to find another client who needs a better portion of your skills or would you rather stay in this relationship when you think that leaving it could harm your client even more? Would you continue to serve as usual (and get more money) as if nothing happened?
Usually using great weather for work and today is no exception.
Wrote down some keywords in my ideary after reading the paper "Ellagic acid in strawberries": antioxidant, antiinflammatory, antidiabetic, cardioprotective, neuroprotective, prebiotic effect; for prevention & treatment of: cancer (skin, esophageal and oral, cervical, lung, breast, colon, prostate, liver; all suspected), diabetes, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, kidney, liver, eye and neurodegenerative diseases, depression and Alzheimer. EA available in fruits (if not dry) and leaves. Knew that berries are superfoods in general, but even so this list surprises. However, they are probably safe only when not chemically treated.
Wondering whether a heatmap of body functions can exist. Some organs probably work harder than the rest (relative to historic measurements), so it could be useful to know which they are. Now reminds me that I wanted to learn more about the Weibull distribution and the probability of system failure.
Here I try to produce content the way I would like to consume it. But I cannot cover all possibilities and tastes: one visitor might prefer watching only YouTube videos, another may want only images and figures, a third one may prefer in-depth articles that are ten screens long. I am not convinced in the format of any of these, which is why they aren't used here. But when someone writes about "making text on the web unnecessary" in favor of much higher video quality content than exists today, I begin to wonder why YouTube hasn't been completely textified yet.
Sooner or later you will eventually hear about cases where young people, just entering the workforce, start at salaries much higher than yours, the person with many years of experience in multiple programming languages etc. The question then is whether this "industry" deserves you at all. Perhaps it should be left either with no people or only with those having no experience.
"It is important to be likeable when on a software team" was a message I saw in a blog post yesterday. While I appreciate a conflict-free atmosphere, I also have to disagree with this statement. One of the great lessons I received while still at university was that professionalism comes first, even when it could impact the quality of the relationships. We were taught that doing the right thing is more important than being respected within the team. "Likeable" here would mean a "me-too" attitude, possibly paired with fear of self-expression out of constant awareness how others might perceive you. A fear that I also had in my early days.
The quality of many projects today has a lot in common with a squeaky sheet of metal that previously belonged to a high-end car. Avoid.
If five individuals alternated to give you a different advice every day how their project should move forward, tell them that after some careful consideration you decided to adjust the project cost to 5x. Then see whether they'll pay the new price, seek consensus to preserve the old one or leave. Keep in mind that making 3 of 5 people happy may not be qualified as a successful project outcome. That carries a risk for you.
If you couldn't pay, you didn't belong on my contact list. Either as a company or as an individual—it didn't matter. Did I say that company names don't impress me much? Plus, if I left your company, I also left your people too. All of them.
Didn't realize that you could send a query to multiple search engines at the same time and obtain a rank from each one, the combination of them being the rank within your own system. This may be something that price comparison search engines use, for instance. But the HTTP request cost is the reason why you won't see something like this in my work.
Problem sizes matter. If a system allows you to browse up to 50000 items, is it reasonable to expect that it will work equally well with one or even ten millions? Probably not. Try to think differently before you hammer the same nail type.
It's not true that you should always be asking questions. Very often the cost of doing so is higher than the potential gain. Plenty of people exist who try to take advantage of the fact that someone is asking or expect the same peson to bow to them. Great only that a thing like Internet exists to alleviate issues like this. This is to say, use your own judgement. And if the other side doesn't treat you fairly, seek help elsewhere.
Many algorithms can't work well with spurious data. So the requirement quickly shifts to "provide all data"/"fill all existing fields", which the average user perceives as invasive (even I do). This results in fewer filled forms and less data for new companies to begin with. The users feel they are sharing more than needed and fear that at a given point this might be used against them (eventually it will be). We have to ensure that the data gathering process is less dependent on a concrete algorithm implementation. And that people have more freedom to choose to share only the bits and pieces they find appropriate relative to the task they are trying to accomplish. Some users may not want to share their age, nationality or company, because they fear discrimination, for instance. The software has to be able to accept and handle their choice transparently rather than balk about its own requirements. Its task is then to connect the given pieces in meaningful ways. A problem with this approach is that a user might then say: "If person X isn't providing this data, why should I?" The answer is simple—complete lack of data means either a very low-quality service or no service at all. The saying that "users make or break the service" is entirely true. Another question: "If all companies collect so much data, why should ours stay behind?" You are not other companies and are fully responsible for your own choices. If they made a serious mistake and were quick to scale it and very slow to correct it, what does this say about their business?
If you assume that a given question has only one right answer, you may be unable to see how several possibly connected factors interacted to lead to the effect you observed.
Just-in-time programming means you write the code at the time the client expresses the need for it rather than ten days in advance, attempting to address a fictive need that may not exist at all. This helps to eliminate a lot of waste and reduces your technical debt to a minimum.
Digging deep into various freely accessible reports, I came to a figure about driver fatalities by age and sex in 2015 in USA bit.ly/2H4OguF. A quite valuable graphic saying nothing about who drives better, but something about who could.
To avoid focusing on feelings and memories of what happened today, I tried to shift my focus on something different. And here it is: "US states Internet connection speed similarity (30.06.2014)" bit.ly/2H3q1Nh. This is what I had in mind yesterday night.
Back from hospital, scared and saddened. Wishing you to never be a passive observer of someone's convulsions and loss of contact. After an initial scan, doctor rebuked: "I've never seen something like this". Me neither.
Unaware until now that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics has fine-grained data on delays about departures and arrivals by airport and carrier. For instance, you could look only at airplanes operated by Soutwest Airlines which departed from the Atlanta International Airport to learn more about the various delay reasons (departure, carrier, weather, national aviation system, security, late aircraft arrival) and the destination airports affected.
Extracted some of the most common addresses and the most common complaint cause about each one from the Louisville 311 service requests bit.ly/2GYmPCp. If 27 people complained about the same place, citing the same reason, only in a short time, perhaps something there is wrong. But the roots may go deeper, because the issue may present an unaddressed historic problem.
Good to see Louisville providing air quality data from several stations. What I couldn't understand is how PM2.5 could have negative values bit.ly/2qzyoVB. Also, since the stations do not measure the same parameters (or use different means to do so), the results are likely not comparable and require the writing of specific code to parse each case. This makes creating a useful and usable demo from the data especially difficult.
Polynomial fit to z-scores bit.ly/2GYzVjj
Increasing n as in n-gon bit.ly/2GYtooN
Gallons of fuel pumped for each vehicle of the fire department in Louisville (25.08.2011 - 13.04.2018) bit.ly/2GZ5YQ2. Overall, diesel consumption is higher (2.03x), but there are only 79 vehicles using diesel compared to the 132 using unleaded fuel. This means that on average diesel vehicles received more gallons. The top consuming one received 26462.54 gallons whereas the top consuming one in the unleaded category received only 8283.91 gallons. The refueling history by fuel type bit.ly/2H3sJ5C shows a repetitive pattern of loading up to 20 gallons of unleaded fuel at once, whereas for diesel we see that it is more rare to load over 25 gallons at once. Still, sometimes up to 50 gallons of diesel were needed.
Most streets with maximal pavement condition index (PCI) in Portland seem to be located at the north-east of city bit.ly/2qBxnN8
City Centre and library branches footfall in Cardiff, UK bit.ly/2H2aI7t
The zoo in Cologne has a plan for new visitors that my monitor can't even fully capture bit.ly/2qvaeLW. I also miss the label on some animals, being unable to recognize at least a few.
Lines and stops in Prague, the Czech Republic bit.ly/2qsYcCW
An attempt to visualize a green circular walk path in Frankfurt/Main bit.ly/2GY3wJF
Ratings from hygiene inspections of restaurants and takeaways in Belfast (07.08.2007 - 12.01.2016) bit.ly/2quEt5G. I was looking for a relationship between location and rating, but the figure does not hint about any. The data comes from the Belfast City Council.
The last demo now takes time into account when considering the number of comments. This is due to the realization that 100 comments left within 2 days might speak of a higher enthusiasm about the book than 200 comments left within 10 days. Also made the rank values more visible (lower is better). Still not understanding why sometimes the data loads and sometimes doesn't. It may have something to do with when Amazon decides the request is valid and when it believes it comes from an automated bot.
New books by release date on Amazon bit.ly/2GTHNCu. Made this because it was hard for me to track which new books were appearing, which certainly led me to miss some good ones. Greyed out titles whose release date is in the future (pre-order only?). Placed some green checkmarks on few titles which the numbers hint they might be good. Note that this list may stop working anytime Amazon makes changes to its page structure. If you care about it, feel free to send me a notice when this happens.
Finding the families of plant species bit.ly/2GUBuPk. Didn't know that coriander belongs to the family of carrots. Tasted honey with such flavor once and after a few days the jar was empty.
Don't say you have an entire year of measurements about multiple locations when your sensor captured values six times on a single day at a single location.
International roughness index (IRI) of the streets in Montreal, which had perfect pavement condition (PCI=100) in 2015 bit.ly/2qtjOiv
Point adresses in Montreal, Canada bit.ly/2qsVTjd
Parks and green spaces in Shawinigan, QC bit.ly/2qrAXZT
Public Wi-Fi spots in Quebec, Canada bit.ly/2GRn7uY. High concentration on the east.
From very incomplete data, having lots of null values bit.ly/2qrQVmZ, I was able to extract the average daily traffic flow at least at some locations in Quebec bit.ly/2qpXwy6. I was interested to which place the separate red spot belongs. But it says only "Bouvier Street (east of highway 358)".
Public roads in Quebec, Canada bit.ly/2qrzym2 (via Ville de Québec bit.ly/2GPMH3z)
Good to see so many organizations having corrected so many critical violations in childcare bit.ly/2GTUTji according to the DOHMH's (Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) childcare center inspections (bit.ly/2qu0SQX). These numbers show so much improvement. When we consider it, we all were kids once before, so we know how easily bad behavior can affect a child's psyche. At least several publications show the long term impact of bad early child care. Whether a mother that screams louder than her child is crying—in an attempt to calm it down—does properly, I leave to you to decide. But every neighbor may have a different opinion on this.
Some land subdivisions in Columbus, Ohio bit.ly/2GP9Z9G. Uses data provided by the City of Columbus bit.ly/2qoFoog.
Comparison of the characteristics of some EIZO monitors bit.ly/2qqweaT. By reusing this code (without the pricing attribute) and adding hundreds of iiyama models, we obtain the following result bit.ly/2qproKT. The first model in the code is also first in the rank; yet not everyone might like a diagonal size of over 100cm.
When your web page is in "stand-by", it shouldn't consume close to 50% CPU. Someone might by trying to type while wondering why their letters appear so slowly.
Seth Godin talked about the need of speaking what can be improved. Since I am a happy Linux user, I noticed one small thing that could still make a difference, at least to people like me. It falls into the file management category. The built-in file manager often takes disproportional amount of time to open a large directory. By switching to another one which loads all files in reasonable time, I noticed a side effect: If I have small number of files in the left and right pane, file movements are almost instantaneous. But If I have a large directory (say "Unread") and want to move a file from it to another one (say "Read"), the time it takes is non-trivial. When multiplied by the number of papers opened over time, it quickly adds up. Not sure whether this is an issue with the file manager or with the kernel. But kernel updates seem to gradually reduce this time. Still, it can take up to 4-5s per file and if it can happen within 1s that would an improvement factor of 4x. Probably worth speaking about. Perhaps some of you observe a similar behavior?
Realized that the graph from two days ago didn't minimize edge crossings. Should be more careful next time.
On the branch information page I noticed something small that left me unimpressed: there are arrows placed on the left and right of the photo of each branch, but they are decorative and not functional. My expectation was that on click another branch photo would appear, allowing me to move between the photos. Yet, clicking had not effect. By making the design look as a usage pattern it is easy to violate the user expectations. If there aren't more photos, the arrows are redundant.
Conrad branches in Germany (08.04.2018) bit.ly/2GL4vws. Still remembering the large catalog with various parts that my father showed me when I was a kid. It was thick, containing thousands of pages with electronic parts in various shapes and colors, all having different functions and characteristics. There were potentially countless ways in which these parts could have been combined, which I found fascinating. I spent a good amount of time learning about them, but the well-polished boxes with the screw mechanism made a big impression to me. I could imagine using them to keep smaller parts or something precious inside. The entire catalog was as if someone took an entire museum and presented it in visual and popular form in front of me. Currently, the catalogs I find on the Conrad's page bit.ly/2GHk74p do not seem to have such a variety. They still have the boxes (towards the end of the catalog), but only few models where previously they were around 20. Here are the designs of two sample pages from the 2017 catalog: bit.ly/2qhcO8f and bit.ly/2GK06dh.
Vienna seems to have a lot of green space relative to its territory bit.ly/2GG5EW7. One source even claims it to be 51%. Even then, there are still many white zones. Uses data provided by the city of Vienna (data.wien.gv.at) and the European data portal. With the help of additional sources, we can see how other cities (world & UK) compare to that bit.ly/2GHllg5
Good visualizations help us understand the story even if we don't know the language bit.ly/2qe6u1y. In this example, the locations of several places of interest are shown on a map first and then to each one we see multiple air quality measurements assigned. Notice the clever use of the available space at the top and how the title is aligned both to the text on the right and to the map at the bottom. The legend at the top stands out nicely and the lines further clarify which part of the bar the texts describe. The measurements at each place are shown on a sky-blue background (signaling that the domain is air) and the bars are mostly in white (signaling that they are about something we hardly even notice). No attribute label appears twice: each bar is associated with a small icon, which in itself leads the eye to the legend on the right. This saves a lot of space and removes a lot of potential clutter. Even when the diagram is about 2016, we still see how the air quality attributes have varied historically. The subtle box "Index=100" informs us that these values are relative and not absolute. Both the temporal and spatial perspective are given.
Good to see some parkings in Rotterdam transmit information about per-place occupancy along with physical boundaries instead of showing the counts in the "free" and "occupied" categories bit.ly/2GFM0JR. If there were much more parking places, tracking this in real-time could become more interesting.
Highlight the most connected people in a sample social network bit.ly/2qeDtCV
Locations of the libraries in Vienna, Austria bit.ly/2GF9uiq
The star cluster NGC 3293 in a colorized grid bit.ly/2qe2b6b. Original image by ESO/G. Beccari. The images page of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is also worth a visit.
"Patients are sometimes kept alive for 31 days (after surgery), so that their mortality is not reflected in the hospital's metrics." - Jerry Z. Muller in "The tyranny of metrics". Terrible and even more so when you realize that this could happen to almost anyone. The author gives some good examples how "beautifying" and obsessive fixation on metrics can have adverse impact on people motivation, company performance and more.
Line-circle intersection tests bit.ly/2qbMqwJ
This week's offers at Lidl bit.ly/2qacLLo
It is very easy to assume that the patterns someone invented which then became widely spread/adopted are the only good ones worth using. But this is a fallacy. We can't do our best work when we blindly apply the same techniques irrespective of the domain and the needs of the project. And if we think about it, doing so only makes these patterns even more popular. It follows that popularity can arise simply from misunderstanding, which in intself may become a requirement.
Comparing people flow bit.ly/2Emjffj. Inspired by an idea which probably deserves its isolation.
A payment that didn't pay has not fulfilled its purpose. It's like a worker who didn't work.
"We provide data from many sensors located across the entire city." Then I check one—no response. Another one—the same. All of them automatedly instead of manually—only four respond with values (each measuring one of humidity, temperature, pressure or CO₂), yet they have the same geocoordinates. I doubt that this is sufficient to summarize the state of an entire city well. Despite having 24-hour data about these attributes, some of them don't seem to vary much, which means that even a time series graphic may not give a good picture of the current situation. Not what I expected, since it effectively cancels what I started.
Annual consumer price indices in various countries (1960 - 2014) bit.ly/2JksAYN
Speaking about exploration, Xplorit has virtual tours where you can see in a 360° perspective how various places in USA look like. (Santa Clara's website refers to it.) You can even take a look inside some buildings and move between rooms by clicking around. Or even look at the city from above, moving on a sky-fly spherical trajectory from one place to another. Fairly impressive website, considering the quality of the perspectives and how fast it loads. A small problem is that it is not immediately clear when the images were last updated. But this could make you realize that a shopping center too can have virtual tours of its stores, so that people can see what's going on there at the moment. However, this may require a significant investment in expensive equipment, which makes the idea hardly applicable at most places.
Noticed that many websites of shopping centers/malls simply show the logos of the companies which rent space there. I admit that having grey blocks with carefully designed and centered logos having the same consistent color looks beautiful and helps to inspire trust. Yet, the function of a great website is not merely to be beautiful, but also useful. The logos can only inform the visitor which brands are available, but they tell nothing about physical location. If there are more than fifty spread across multiple floors, the visitor of this website would be no better in knowing where to seek one than a random person who enters for the first time, not having visited the website first. Providing a plan of all stores enables people to also see the shape/location of each one and use their spatial memory once they enter. It also helps to have a small description of what makes a given store unique. Imagine that brands like Sony, Pentax, Nikon and Canon have stores on the same floor. Should someone with interest in photography visit them all before being able to accomplish a task? Which one should they enter first? That's not helpful and wastes a lot of time (in walking and asking questions). It is better to know the strengths of each store in that particular mall. Perhaps, for competitive reasons, all brands have adjusted their offers and a person who looks for a camera may see only models who stand well relative to the nearby store offerings. Or a tripod may no longer be available at one store, because another one decided to present their entire gamma. Yet, there is noone who helps new visitors develop the right kind of associations in advance, which is a missed opportunity. (A pure list of brand names positioned before an escalator is also nonconclusive where someone has to look upon arrival.) This is what a web designer having to work on such a website can do. And it also means that to present that center well, one has to stay in constant touch with representatives of the various brands to know and be aware of the changes they introduce and the impact they have on the place. It is far too simple to serve (and produce blocks of logos) only in the interest of the landlord when this is the entity that pays for the website. But without brands willing to rent space, there will be low or no income for the landlord, which can become costly to the point that they decide to save on the additional cost of developing a website.
Routes and stops in Albuquerque bit.ly/2EjNlzW
Total installed solar PV capacity in UK bit.ly/2Jiu8SZ
Never heard sound files from cumulative energy usage over time before bit.ly/2Ejz4mR. Considering the number of appliances this house has, analyzing the audio might be interesting. Unfortunately, the sound cannot give us information about the exact time of the measurement or the appliances which produced it. And the data itself is enormous: 16 weeks * 180 files * 200MB + 1 week * 77 files * 200MB ≈ 591.4GB. Maybe this is the reason why not the entire year worth of data was captured about this house.
City of Topeka expenses bit.ly/2Ej6XEr (Source: bit.ly/2q5DdWG). Included only the top 30 sources of expense, where construction, interest on debt and employee compensation/benefits are found frequently. I am slightly sceptical about the starting date, but have no easy way to check it due to the size of the file. I took the minimum and maximum of all dates, but 01.01.1970 seems slightly suspicious to me (perhaps you can check this yourself). Another thing that makes me uncomfortable is the thought that the value of a dollar ten years ago is quite different than the value of a dollar today, so by taking the sum of all amounts, I was effectively doing value comparisons. Not good.
Median NO₂ concentration by the hour on Market Street, Hebden Bridge in Calderdale (01.07.2016 - 31.12.2016) bit.ly/2q6IKft. Some values were missing, so the picture is approximate.
Feder bit.ly/2uJNRYL
Air quality measurements at different locations in Eindhoven, the Netherlands bit.ly/2uMrLox
Domestic and international passenger traffic at the Dulles International Airport (1962-2016) bit.ly/2GvdGBn
Comparing windows bit.ly/2JfFtmN. Ironically, during my work on this, received the request to clean the windows, which was a demo in itself.
If salaries rise much more slowly than rents, then at some point people will have to either renegotiate them, look for jobs that pay more or switch to live in cheaper neighborhoods. The effect could be that many employers who used to employ cheap workers will have to look for new ones.
Average WG room rents in some German cities bit.ly/2pZNlQx. Made this primarily for myself to see how much rents have increased relative to the time when I was a student there. Based on an article from a couple of days ago. The author mentioned that in Munich, for instance, the average room rent has reached 616 euro/month, while the average rent for a 30m² room has reached 785 euro/month. Rooms in Frankfurt and Stuttgart were said to be available to students at ≈480euro/month on average, based on the offers on a well-known website. Compared to that, rooms in Magdeburg, Cottbus and Chemnitz were said to cost 241, 230 and 212 euro/month on average. If a student spends 5 years in a 30m² room in Hamburg, provided the rent doesn't increase, only their rental cost would come at 5 * 12 * 500 = 30000 euro. In addition to this debt, elementary things like food, handouts/books, communication, transportation, events can quickly increase the costs. In my opinion, it is no longer realistic to believe that part-time work during the study can cover such expenses.
When some previously weakly typed, interpreted languages are updated to look as if strongly typed, one starts to anticipate that code written in them may need to be compiled soon. Something that made weakly typed languages popular in the past is in risk of being removed.
Reminds me of a mistake Facebook did many years ago. They pushed an ad about car parts in front of me, showing a modern new car and a provocative woman lying on the front hood. I found this insulting, not only due to the fact that cars and women were precisely the two topics I was least interested to hear about. Something struck me deeply about this combination and the lengths they were willing to go to capture advertising revenue. In addition, I received the ad again in a language that they thought I was interested in. Needless to say, after the long waiting period, I left the site (having to delete all my posts one by one) and never looked back. This was probably some 7-8 years ago. The Twitter account I had lasted only three months longer. Both sites were not what I expected, so I am still happy with my choice.
Dear Coursera, don't send me mails in a language I don't want to see. You might assume that I'm sufficiently knowledgeable to understand it, but you are wrong. Plus, I have my own preference how I want to read my information, yet you didn't bother to ask.
If you believe you have a good project and the necessary funding, while seeking someone to realize it, and you think that working together would improve the outcome, feel free to contact me. I consider all proposals even when I have capacity to accept only few. ~~And if a stubborn backup doesn't annoy you, that's even better.~~
Currently going through the painful process of backing up files on a slow, external drive, after remembering how I lost almost half of those I had once before. I didn't do more recent backups, so this was necessary. The big files were copied relatively fast, but the small ones (mostly code from various libraries) seem to be challenging, since the copy speed has fallen to ≈210Kb/s (and still is) and I get estimated time left of more than a day. To avoid thinking about this and meanwhile do something else, I tried to browse some visited websites. Previously, I always perceived them as fast, but now they were mostly stuttering, likely due to I/O effects. Even when the backup won't end soon, this gave me a nice reminder to not assume that the websites we create will be the only users of a given resource, when it might be shared across tasks. If possible, we have to test our websites under more conservative scenarios than we expect.
An idea to reduce waiting time at supermarkets bit.ly/2pRc89r ↗. Spent another 10mins in line today, which could have been used for something else.
"There was quite a controversy in the UK when the National Health Service (NHS) gave Google DeepMind access to patients' medical records. That didn't exactly inspire trust." Maybe because data has the tendency to reach third parties and be used for reasons beyond the original purpose (considering the long view). What if patients started to receive recommendations for pills or surgeries? The wider problem: Which individual researcher could sound as convincing as to get an equivalent approval? Or: Given this data, can DeepMind contribute valuable insights to the public domain (NHS possibly operates in the name of social interest) which are broadly useful without mentioning the states of concrete patients? All interesting questions.
Never agreed to work against unrealistic expectations; accepting anything that appears like this is unprofessional. A big educational institution was seeking a web application developer that can "scale the education process and organize secure exams". While the first part of the requirement appears almost fine, the second doesn't. They can go and inspect the security in any Fortune 100 company—it doesn't matter which one they choose. Because we still keep hearing stories about them, full of accusations, lawsuits and disappointment. And here this institution comes, to expect from an individual what a corporation can't accomplish. It is for reasons like this that I made the jobs page a long time ago and why I still don't regret it.
Had no idea what stress taxi drivers in New York have to endure bit.ly/2Gd9HoJ
While testing an idea over an image with coffee art, got an unexpected result that the contours of the coffee cup have become more colorful bit.ly/2pIzJtE
"To keep pace with population growth, more food will be needed in the next 50 years than has been produced in the past ten thousand years combined."—Daugherty/Wilson in "Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI" Sounds scary. So we have to see whether precision agriculture can become that precise. Also liked the examples with the cooperating robots and how an AI system analyzing natural language helped Virgin Trains reduce their manual complaint-response work by 85%.
Parcels in El Dorado County bit.ly/2pD1jZt (Data source: bit.ly/2GaWHzU). The black areas were not supposed to exist, but the diagram gives a good overview overall. Took hours to compute; had to add the title after that.
"The original Kangaroo Route from Australia to London was named for the seven stops it made over four days back in 1947." (A direct flight from Perth to London (9009 miles) by Qantas Airlines took 17 hours and 2 mins.) Average speed: (9009 * 1.609344) / (17 + 2/60) = 851.18km/h?
Not sure to what extent rainfall contributes to higher or lower wheat (or any other crop) yield, but I think that questions like this can often reveal interesting findings. What is important is that we have the tools to look at such relationships, the only limiting factors being data availability, our time on Earth and insatiable curiosity/willingness to explore.
Surface-level urban line stops in Milan, Italy bit.ly/2pDz2SC (Source: bit.ly/2pEO5e0). DBSCAN is able to identify only five clusters where over 20 line stops can be seen within a very small radius.
In some cases new pavements are said to be built to last for a period of up to twenty years. They must be unbreakable and durable, no matter the weather conditions or what attempts to grow from below. If the edges stick out, someone might stumble over or slip on a surface when it's snowy. This raises a question about how we should be thinking and approaching our own design and code, even when the possibility to have them visible/operational after such a long timeframe might seem unrealistic. Every subsequent change of a product is a chance to examine whether the gains realized by usage of the previous version have fully covered its development plus operational costs. Because by proceeding, we agree to continue this perpetual, temporal theme, where taking suboptimal decisions could mean that someone, somewhere, one day may not have a good pavement/base below their feet. We have to know the past of the context to understand what can be improved and see whether our processes and execution quality fully reflect the years we would like our new creation to survive. How big should the improvement factor be—5, 15 or 50 times (for that many years)? That said, software, which must be changed/adapted every two months is likely having cracks in its structure; before providing value to its users, it already asks for costly rework, effectively taking resources away. If the previous cycle had a negative outcome, proceeding further means that we bet on the reasons why it will be different next time (high-risk). Having unclear vision backed with short-term fixes/hacks can very easily repeat the last cycle. At some point, even if a "software cathedral" appears, it's construction may be unstable or its further maintenance prohibitive.
Statistics on New York yellow taxi trip records for 2017 bit.ly/2pC8lh4 (Source: on.nyc.gov/2pEQDJN). An interesting finding is that on average every second in a taxi costs the client around five cent (0.05$) if we consider all trip durations and the total amount charged for each trip (that's not cheap). This rate was observed throughout the entire year. If you have seen my previous work, you probably remember that the median trip duration of ≈12 mins looks very similar to what some bike systems have registered (strange). You probably agree that the total amount of 150-160 million dollar/month charged for all trips represents a big opportunity for most taxi drivers and businesses. May was an interesting month, because passengers used taxis longer and paid more, but for some reason the number of registered trips seems to have decreased quite a lot.
Street lights with known system wattage in San Jose bit.ly/2pzLNxo (Source: bit.ly/2pEdYv9). Only 718 such lights exists, having a total wattage of 63389.80W. The average unit system wattage comes at 88.29W.
Point fitting with a polynomial of second degree bit.ly/2pA4lhc
Seeing four football playgrounds next to each other for the first time (on a photo). Formed in a 2x2 grid of rectangles with a small control building at the center. Minimum wasted land, maximum playable area. Finding applications of optimization is always interesting.
Number of mosquitos trapped in Plano, Texas (03.2016 - 03.2018) bit.ly/2pAMs0L
Learning about O'Reilly conferences bit.ly/2G3FuZ6. The keyword "Web" appears in 11.11% of all conference names/themes. "Artificial Intelligence" is becoming an increasingly popular topic.
I admit that (state, action, reward) triples modeled on a graph could become interesting. Each node holds state and reward, while each edge has an action verb attached to it. Only that knowing this information (which depends both on the agent's and the wider context and can theorefore change every second) in advance is rare. In theory, nice theory.
Measure daily progress against an exercise target given by a fitness instructor bit.ly/2ubrmM2
Kernel density estimation of the commuter times in Riverside, California (2006 - 2015) bit.ly/2IItsGw. As you can see, the number of people who travelled most (over 90 minutes) has increased in 2015. But the group of the most people (traveling around 20 mins) has also expanded and the commuters in it have slightly increased relative to 2009.
Block averaging of an image bit.ly/2pnyGhY
Countries by population density (2018) bit.ly/2pmMsS2. Monaco and Macao are most crowded, but their areas are very small. Singapore and Hong Kong follow. Despite having the biggest population, China (ranks 79th) has only 64% of the population density of Germany (ranks 57th). USA ranks at place 177 with 36 people per square kilometer. Canada and Australia have only 4 and 3.
Used ridge regression to attempt predicting the electricity consumption in the Phillippines bit.ly/2pl3nUS. The value of 84807.31 (units were not given) for 2018 must be seen as an estimate.
Loving the effect of getting the average of multiple images bit.ly/2pjtlIw. The one at the top is obtained only from six other images, while the one at the bottom is produced by the combination of fifteen. The first looks clearner while the second appears more color-rich. Weighted average could have brought forward selected silhouettes—of the rose, for instance. With Numpy the results come fast.
Average announced rents in different districts in Luxembourg (01.07.2016 - 30.06.2017) bit.ly/2IwjS9w
National geopaths in Luxembourg bit.ly/2ItzdaZ
Departures and arrivals at the Luxembourg Airport bit.ly/2pheAWw
Average rent in some cities in Finland bit.ly/2ItnetW
Cost of living and wage/salary indices in Finland bit.ly/2IwYfpE. Looking only at the last couple of years shows a slightly more positive development.
Comparison of domestic and international air traffic at the airport of Helsinki-Vantaa and of all airports in Finland bit.ly/2phPK8U. Please, note that with the exception of the last year in the graphic (2016), the data has been collected at an interval of 5 years, which means that the values of in-between years are interpolated and may not resemble the actual values in these years. I tried to clarify this visually as much as possible.
Bike paths in Helsinki, Finland (plan 2025) bit.ly/2piqGib. Not sure whether 1.5 years later this is still accurate.
Most Nobel Prizes were given for advancing medicine, closely followed by physics. Wondering whether this could make Stephen Hawking happier. Worth remembering how often physics is misunderstood/underappreciated. How forces interplay, kinematics, wave propagation, electricity and magnetism are all interesting topics in their own right. The degree to which physics can make itself invisible is both fascinating and beautiful.
Do you find that a patient needs to know about the availability of a given medicine in nearby pharmacies before they physically enter them? If so, are you aware of attempts to enable this?
Found a visualization of the traffic noise at facade points in Göteborg bit.ly/2ItJ1BN. Haven't seen noise data mapped in such detail before.
Location of the GTFS stops in Sweden bit.ly/2peYqwU. The diagonal between Stockholm and Göteborg seems particularly strong.
Lines inside circle and code bit.ly/2IszESJ. A drawing explains itself in a 24kB image.
Saw a self-generated graphic from a dataset describing that the efficiency of photovoltaics and offshore wind installations is expected to grow (initially much faster for photovoltaics, but then slightly faster for offshore wind, so that it gradually approaches the first over a very long time). I am reluctant to show the figure, because I don't believe that someone can project for the next 100 years, no matter how accurate they think their model is.
Compare image similarities by Euclidean distance bit.ly/2Iu4Xg0
Pairwise element operations in a matrix via operation matrices bit.ly/2Isly3V
An inconvenient truth: understanding high dimensional data is also a function of reading ability. Before we instruct the software to parse only what we need, we parse with our eyes first to decide on this (data exploration). Each and every time. A reason why unsupervised methods have received so much interest. The only question is whether hardware decisions can fully replace human decisions and the extent to which they are available and efficient in use.
Interesting that there is a measure how well one polygon approximates another. Seeing this for the first time.
"Why do you need to study math when you have no applications for it?" It does seem like waste, doesn't it? A good reminder is that the applications don't come to us falling from the sky. They are something we have to find ourselves. By exploring wide and deep, we increase our chance to find good ones. We don't have to be mathematicians in order to apply math in the same way we don't have to be designers in order to design.
Country features as a matrix bit.ly/2pd6xdn and t-SNE applied on them bit.ly/2pdAmKU. Relatively interesting groups. At the top, unfortunately, the labels of China and India overlap. Regarding t-SNE: Better not to use it on datasets exceeding moderate size (e.g. all-time history of access logs) as it may not finish in reasonable time.
Street segments in Boston bit.ly/2pbhLit
Libraries in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2paXNnT. A diagonal walk could reach most. You can also see the street tree types with more than 300 exemplars in this city bit.ly/2Ip23cq
Garages by registered capacity in San Francisco bit.ly/2InMFNf. Most seem to be located in the Northeast.
Office buildings in Minneapolis with high source EUI bit.ly/2p9TKZ4. First time using exponential scale to bring some data points into focus.
The global innovation index next to the innovation efficiency ratio for 2017 bit.ly/2p7VySq. Also liked the graphics about the top 5 innovation clusters, said to be Tokyo-Yokohama, Shenzhen-Hong Kong, San Jose-San Francisco, Seoul, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto.
Creative goods exports, data from 2015 bit.ly/2InxsMh. A category that I find quite important.
Visualization of the smart cities index for 2017, published by Easypark bit.ly/2ImXfo3. Not perfect, but at least informative. Even cities in the bottom 25% of the matrix score high in the categories "environment protection" and "WiFi hotspots".
Average age of the cars (in years) at different places in Barcelona, 2016 bit.ly/2IpOoC0. Although I used the same initial data, my weighting seems to differ slightly from the one used in the dataset, where the averages for each place were given (which are slightly different). For instance, for cars less than a year old I used weight 0.5, for cars one year old, 1.5 and so on, always averaging between the start and end point in time. For car ages 11-20 I used a weight of 15.5 and for cars older than 20 years I had a weight of 25. For instance, the average car age given for Barcelona as a whole in the dataset is 11.3 years, whereas with this weighting scheme it comes at 11.77 years. By obtaining the approximate coordinates of each place, we see that some neighbors have very similar average car ages. The newest cars were driven in the South (la Marina del Prat Vermell) and in the East (Diagonal Mar i el Front Maritim del Poblenou). The oldest cars were driven in the North (Torre Baró and Vallbona) and some areas in the South of the city.
If the spinner has time to make more than 3-5 full rotations, this indicates a possible problem. And if there are 3-4 spinners at different sections of the page that run simultaneously, this creates a very awkward feeling.
Do you remember the games where the player "unlocked" more features the more intensively they played? Good software doesn't have to overwhelm the user with functionality from the start. It can gradually unfold it over time, the more it is used. This way it can be adapted to current needs of the user without introducing more than necessary (frequent cause for seeking alternatives). Someone might say that this is incremental, while competitive products might be iterated much faster. But I believe that the long-term effect of having careless users is more negative compared to some loss of opportunity arising from not being first to market. Validating a concept before scaling it instead of going the other way around, must be priority. Simply increasing development effort and cost when this is not justified can quickly lead to waste.
I decided early on that I don't want to be known for my name, age, gender, nationality, race/religion or other societal "norms", often used for comparative/discriminative reasons. I want to be known only for my work. If you find this unacceptable, there are plenty of other people you can speak to.
Convex hull can be used to mark the extent to which a disease has spread. Can you think of other uses?
"Storage is not a very good business model." I suppose that it depends. If you are offering someone 5MB to let them read their email, perhaps that's not adding a lot of value. But if you provide enough storage to NASA to enable the analysis of all galaxy data, enough storage to NCBI to enable analysis of all existing genomes, enough storage to understand all types of weather conditions, or enough storage to understand highly dynamical systems, then perhaps this is another story. The result of having many businesses lack enough storage is that they can only analyse a limited amount of data, which can lead to a more narrow view of the environment (and lost opportunities to bigger companies). We already see that the most valuable datasets are multiple terabytes big and a powerful neural network on powerful hardware can extract a lot of insight from this volume compared to more manual approaches on a small machine that can't improve its data locality. But if storage capacity frequently remains unused and the storage business has no utilization plans for mining (more) valuable data, then this is a form of waste. Could be what hides behind the original statement.
An article I came across claimed that Uber and Lyft aren't providing data to the general public. I don't believe they have to. A fundamental right of every business is to not disclose things that can hurt it. Otherwise everyone would come and ask for insight and free source code to see what their competitors are doing better to earn their millions. There's no such thing as free lunch. Everyone must decide on their own what they can and can't afford to share.
Stores in shopping centers/malls also generate lots of data (which isn't public). There are many metrics they can track: costs/number of clients per unit floor space, store visitors/passing people, buyers/store visitors, sales/size of sales staff, median value of unit sold. Plenty of opportunities for people able to squeeze knowledge from the data and utilize it to plan concrete actions. But many businesses still don't know how to utilize the data they have.
Finding numbers dominating the rows and columns of a matrix bit.ly/2IixK76. A very similar idea (mentally striking the rows and columns) can be used while solving sudoku puzzles. We can "crystallize" the important, while muting the irrelevant values. For this purpose masked arrays work well, but manually inspecting large matrices becomes increasingly harder.
Saw a map with the Las Vegas traffic cameras bit.ly/2Ij3HvX ↗, but when I click on one, I get the message "This plugin is not supported". Who knows, perhaps something simple can be done to make the images appear again. #accessibility
Mobile telephony antennas in Geneva, Switzerland bit.ly/2p6cb0R. Do you think that such antennas are harmful in general? I heard both positive and negative opinions, but never saw data on the topic. I suspect that Wi-Fi radio may have the same effect, so whenever possible, cable communication is probably preferable due to the reduced exposure to waves. Edit: The sentence "Long term exposure even to small amounts of x can be harmful" may not refer particularly to Wi-Fi, but it doesn't hurt to be paranoid and consider it seriously.
Clustering teams from NBA standings bit.ly/2p6hT2R. In case you notice mistakes, feel free to correct me.
Impressed that you can take an old tree off the ground, pneumatically remove the soil from its roots and trim them to the absolute minimum it needs to survive. This method is said to be able to extend its life, but I wondered whether it could be more general. That to become once again "younger", one needs to trim some of the roots and beliefs accumulated over time. To forget about any previous setbacks and see the world from a fresh, non-judgemental perspective.
Park facilities in Boise bit.ly/2p5pcYl. Many trailheads and off-leash dog areas. Seven swimming pools, two golf clubs, one zoo.
Invitation to dinner bit.ly/2Dj9Uo0
60-70 thousand cars passing through a street per day means 42-48 cars passing each minute on average (on a Los Angeles street). That's a lot of traffic. Friday and Thursday appear more busy than usual, but after the weekend days in reversed order, Tuesday shows the most reduced level of traffic. (Source: LA County, bit.ly/2p868ci)
Speaking of annotation, do you find it a good practice when the labels on a metro map are rotated at almost arbitrary degrees and positioned sometimes before the point, sometimes after? I understand that where lines join there may not be enough room left to place a label, so that special rotation/positioning becomes necessary. But what about all other cases?
For fast annotation, you need to know what to annotate and how useful that might be in your software. Valuable data is usually not available elsewhere and is one that can lead to useful, actionable insights that can be implemented in your everyday work, in a given context. Delegating this work to the users means that you expect your user base to generate data much faster than you do, which for new, unproven software is unrealistic. A fast typist can generate a lot more data and in a much shorter time than many dedicated users can. The reason is simple: the typist works on the task full-time and has full control on the quality of the data, while the users come sporadically, use the app for a short time, provide optional/incomplete/tainted input and then switch doing something else. It's hard to scale your database or create anything of value when the quality of your input is so low. ("Garbage in, garbage out") Since automated label extraction already exists and tasks are often handled remotely/in the cloud, the work of the individual typist is now not valued highly enough or is outsourced for cents. But the opposite might also become true one day: once the algorithms consume all available, valuable information, more data annotation might be needed to feed their curiosity beyond that point (as otherwise they would be relying on "old" data). We already see the first signs of the wave of problems that automated data generators, chatbots and other systems have started to create. Sentences feel as if written by someone who knows the words, but is not quite capable of combining them into a meaningful sentence; music sequences are hard to stand for more than three minutes. While the underlying algorithms are just starting to appear and there is no doubt they will be improved, there is an important difference between human-generated and artificially generated data: algorithms don't have life. And it is life itself that generates our data. An algorithm doesn't even know what a plant it, because it can't smell it, can't see how long it is, what's the color of the leaves or how many there are. All this data was purely enabled through life and it needs someone to explain/annotate/codify this in a format that it can understand. It's not just life in the wider environment, but also in every biological cell, every individual, every virus. An algorithm therefore has no notion how life itself might change. Unless it is equipped with the same sensors and thinks like a human being, it would be relatively indifferent if a major flood happened tomorrow, for example. But if trained, it could eventually predict that event or incoporate the knowledge of the present into future estimates. Because there are hardware limitations (you can't store an infinite amount of data to enable infinite precision), smaller entities might need annotators in the future as well, since efficient/succinct annotation will reduce their storage costs (allowing direct expression of concepts) and enable much faster computation than at places with unclear/lax data format priorities. An additional advantage of smaller entities is that have unique information that motivates the need for such annotation. Since we have a lot more smaller companies than big, the job of the good annotator is unlikely to be replaced soon, even when the current common wisdom might point in that direction. So instead of saying "We don't need you anymore", think about some more polite ways to explain your annotator that you were happy to work with them and that you will eventually come back once your algorithm begins starving for more annotated data.
Implementing functionality noone uses is possibly one reason why more apps weren't created. Every app needs its users and not eventual, probabilistic usage. When the users don't come, app creation for the sake of creation becomes pure air.
Radical syntax changes in a programming language incur a cost to all programmers in that language. From that viewpoint, programming seems to be at a disadvantage compared to math. Can you remember when basic symbols for sum, product, integral or gradient were changed for the last time? In programming, syntax might change every month and merely staying up-to-date with such pace can be exhausting. Someone might come and overhaul the language completely just because they think it works best this way. (It doesn't.) A better alternative would have been to ask the wider community about the best way forward, not only to gather opinions, but also support for the proposals. Working to the principle "ask for apology after the fact" is always possible, but this has a universal cost. If the changes don't happen according to a checklist, but haphazardly, we risk having to work with languages which increasingly resemble collections of patches, encouraging "stick-this-here" thinking. Weakly typed languages add constructs to mimic strongly typed ones. Prototypal languages become class-based. The "function" keyword disappears and "var" gets updated to "let". How much change are people willing to endure? Are they willing to spend their entire lives learning about syntax changes or should they switch to broader, syntax-free concepts, more often described in papers? If many people chose the latter or switched to another, more stable language, future changes/additions wouldn't matter much.
There is no need to work for a salary lower than your monthly rent + consummables, no matter what "experience", "connections", "opportunities", "social benefits" or "salary raises" a company has to offer you. You live once and deserve better. If you postpone your life, you'll regret it. Sharpen your negotiation skills and learn how to deal with unscrupulous people or hidden attempts to force you into work focusing primarily on your weaknesess instead of on your strengths. If you see that after starting at a company, it gives you new, obscure technologies to learn while you can't apply what you are already best at, this might be a sign that explaining how unproductive you are was planned in order to tell you that your current salary is a bit too high. If you let others talk your skills small, you'll eventually become small.
Sad to see so many small businesses feeding the large platforms. Imagine what would happen if instead of offering your work on Ebay, Etsy or elsewhere you took photos of all your porcellan figurines and offered them on a dedicated website, avoiding direct comparisons and price wars, while at the same time making your brand more exclusive. Currently, you are one of the many; the willingness to trade conveniently from a couch costs you a small fortune. You can be known and sell many items at profit close to zero or you can be much less known and sell few items at profit you determine. Which one do you think could work better in the long term?
You can program the interface or position and adjust every single element manually. This is the difference between robotic and human interfaces. The usual excuses why the second doesn't happen: "it takes too much time", "it's not maintainable", "it's not scalable". Or "you shouldn't reinvent the wheel" when library X is available. What if everyone else is also using sacrosanct library X? How will you distinguish your work when you are unwilling to invest the hours or to go beyond the well-trampled path? CSS and web design are still about element positioning first, but not positioning in terms of absolute perfection. Anything that looks perfect is just not believable as "perfect" doesn't exist. Creating perfection programmatically is an artificial step that moves us away from the chance to appear more human. From the chance to evaluate the utility of each element, to position it manually and to examine how it relates to other elements. You probably already tried to create a complex drawing through code—the more nuanced it was, the more entangled your code became. At a certain point you asked yourself whether a painting program wouldn't have worked faster. Where a lot of flexibility is required, adding more code may not be the best approach.
"The marginal cost of software is zero" Don't know. I charge. The butterflies in front of your eyes, if you can afford that.
Used a Kaggle dataset to check how the unemployment rate in various US counties evolved over time bit.ly/2oZHfzf. Among the top 20 counties with lowest median unemployment rate, ten are in Nebraska, eight in North Dakota and the other two that register are South Dakota and Virginia. Not sure what happened in San Juan County, Colorado in Jan-Feb 1992 when unemployment rate exceeded 55%. Perhaps someone can provide some background here.
Mushroom classification: edible or not edible. Overconfidence in algorithms could be dangerous.
Perceived performance matters equally in transportation and web design. A driver can bring a person very fast from one location to another, but that won't matter much if the vehicle arrived after 20 minutes of waiting time. Similarly, you can have the most beautiful website, but that too won't matter much if everyone has to wait 2 minutes to load the heavy scripts which enable it. Drivers transport people, websites transport assets.
You can also see the locations of the trees in Mississauga bit.ly/2oWkRXG, the botanical description of the top five types and their prevalence as a percentage of the total number of trees.
Libraries in Mississauga, Canada bit.ly/2I8xQ1a. The city has also provided information about the average service time per request in minutes for all branches. Not something that can be seen often. During the short period of examination in 2017, the slowest branch had an average service time of 4.4mins/request, while the fastest had an average service time of 1.5mins/request. Many regular food stores are much slower than these mental food stores.
Strange that only two letters must be at the right place in each word bit.ly/2p0EyO7
Thinking about Hercule Poirot and graphs, where the nodes indicate times when particular events happened and a path describes a sequence of events. That's probably a different way to look at graphs. It always surprised how he could draw a single polyline solution at the end.
Attractions in Amsterdam bit.ly/2oW7GFW. "Museum Escher in het Paleis" in the south-west sounds intriguing. Uses content from Amsterdam Marketing.
Parking places in Helsinki, Finnland bit.ly/2I926sA. Unfortunately, without current occupancy metrics. The many places make the individual polygons small and hard to see. You can zoom with Ctrl-+ and then return to the original dimensions with Ctrl-0. Not sure how usable this might be on your platform. I frequently find applications which rely on zooming and panning hard to use, but you may see this differently.
Popular books at Edmonton libraries last week bit.ly/2I6n4IL
Having trouble to select one bit.ly/2oPIIIm, so mostly relying on the production machine bit.ly/2I3G8Hw. Turns out that larger circles become increasingly harder to paint, where the blurs also aren't cheap as well.
It is well-known that Germany has traditions with beer, but I was not sure how common breweries are in USA bit.ly/2I5EOnA. According to this data, on a log scale the number of breweries is increasing in most US states. In decreasing order, the states with most breweries in 2016 were California, Washington, New York, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon. The many breweries could mean that beer consumption is also strong there.
Merged some pieces on noise pollution at the Brussel's airport bit.ly/2I3F5Y9. Good to see the noise levels in decibels at day and night. "B787-B Dreamliner requires two tonnes less fuel on average over a distance of 7000km than B767."
Monthly hotel average daily rate and occupancy, Arlington County (01.2014 - 10.2017) bit.ly/2I2fKh8. Arlington County Data API was used for this purpose, but it is not endorsed or certified by Arlington County. The normalized versions of the two patterns also exhibit some similarity, although not a perfect one. The daily rate has slightly increased over time while the occupancy has not changed much. When the occupancy was high, the rates were often high as well (and vice versa).
Total aircraft operations and total passengers at the Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport in Arlington County (normalized values, 01.2015 - 07.2017) bit.ly/2oQFSD0. A nice correspondence of the normalized values can be observed.
Monthly expenditure by department in Arlington County (07.2016 - 06.2017) bit.ly/2I68MYG. Even when nondepartmental transfers have been omitted, the diagram is still hard to describe in words.
Libraries in Arlington County bit.ly/2oT5K0O. Only few, but well-distributed.
Average monthly income per household in different regions of Thailand (1998 - 2015) bit.ly/2I2hjfh. Had to use Google Translator to understand anything. The labels of Nakhon Pathom and Nonthaburi overlap as they were quite close in 2013, but as you can see, their lines diverge in 2015. Good to see that overall this country seems to be improving.
Caltrans route performance (2014 - 2016) bit.ly/2oOIgKr
The files from 2014, 2015 and 2016 contain the words "San Bernardino", "San Bernadino" and "SBD". To check in which file the typo occured, I was using the pint() function...
Trees in Delft, the Netherlands bit.ly/2oLEzoQ
Visits and total circulation of the library branches in Delaware (2013 - 2017) bit.ly/2oK6DJc
Streets with high median traffic counts in Delaware (2007 - 2016) bit.ly/2I0M5oP. The north part of the state seems to be more exposed to strong traffic. You can also see the names of the top 30 streets if you like bit.ly/2oNABfp
An attempt to show the parks in Montreal, Canada bit.ly/2I0Ddzd. Can you confirm the presence or absence of mistakes?
Visits of library branches in Manchester (2016) bit.ly/2oPEsbE. The difference between the Central Library and the rest is staggering.
Various performance metrics about the Texas airport (2012 - 2014) bit.ly/2oMp5B6. I found the revenue per enplanement especially interesting as it is a metric I see for the first time. Hopefully the data collection process is extended so that subsequent years can appear in the data one day in the future.
Reducing the average duration of outages matters. The City of Texas went down from 84.68 mins in 2006 to 48.87 mins in 2016. Every hour of outage means that someone isn't able to do their job and depending on how many people are affected, this can cost a lot.
Water quality at 4 locations according to 3 criteria in Texas bit.ly/2oKBOnE. You can examine the parameters of hundreds of locations bit.ly/2HWrHox
Didn't know that Talinn, Estonia has free public transport, which was introduced 5 years ago (currently for native people only, but looking to make it free for foreigners too). I find this very forward thinking; someone is setting an inspiring example here. This suggests that people can meet and exchange information much more frequently, which could be an additional reason why the country is known for its innovation. No longer surprised why the free transport theme is discussed in Germany now.
"On-street car parking sensor data - 2016" by the City of Melbourne bit.ly/2HYMQPb looks interesting, but I don't have enough space to look at data, whose size is over 1.7GB. Perhaps you could extract interesting facts and present this in a short article that is easier to digest. I noticed that the column "in violation" contains True/False strings, which could have been encoded as zeros or ones to somewhat reduce the disc space requirements. When you have over 34.1 million rows, such minor details start to matter. In web design too, every single character we put on the page has to be tracked closely. With too many DOM elements there is a penalty for lax character packings.
Traffic cameras in British Columbia, Canada bit.ly/2oJKpa4
Producer and consumer price indices for fruits and vegetables (1974 - 2017) bit.ly/2oKjB9H. Reminds me how supply and demand must cross. If someone pays too much to see their production stay long on the shelf, even at a low price, then that's not sustainable. If on the other side they pay little, but due to intermediaries or other factors their production reaches the consumer at a very high price, then that's not sustainable too.
Crime by dispatch hour in Philadelphia (2006 - present) bit.ly/2oKzltk. You can also see the most common dates and locations bit.ly/2HY6w5t and how crime has developed over the years bit.ly/2HXXsxq. Note that 2018 is still in progress. The number of cases is decreasing, which is a good sign. In case geolocation worked fine, then 8 of the top 30 addresses must be very close bit.ly/2HXa0VW
Currently, air quality seems to be good across stations in Florida bit.ly/2oIryMI. However, some more detail regarding PM2.5, PM10 and SO2 would have been nice.
Not perfect since some places seem to be missing (could be either due to missing data or due to my own coding mistake). But at least you can see most of the Pennsylvania municipalities by their location, name and areas bit.ly/2oGqdGe. One municipality may be composed of multiple polygons. After I saw boundaries only, I thought that seeing some more detail would have been nice.
Bus lines and stops in Houston bit.ly/2oH2xkU (uses two datasets by the City of Houston). Most lines describing the routes seem completely covered by stops. But some short line segments show a comparatively low bus stop density assuming that the data is complete. Perhaps such rarefaction is motivated and intentional.
Cumulative electricity usage and bills for properties of the City of Houston (07.2011 - 06.2017) bit.ly/2oHEhPD. Small notice: I removed the first item in each category ("Various"), since I thought that it is unclear what it means when it cannot be attributed to a concrete address. I wanted to create a historical perspective, but unforunately the dates across the multiple files change in format and I was unwilling to make the conversions. If you wish, you can take on the task. The City of Houston provides the data you need bit.ly/2HYDpze. We notice that there is high degree of correspondence between electricity usage and total due bills. But lets take the third and fourth label on the two lists as an example. The gap in electricity usage between the two is relatively big, but the gap in due bills is relatively small. 1001 Chenevert also uses less electricity than 4501 Beechnut #C, but pays slightly more. The advantage of showing many labels is that such relative comparisons become possible.
Street lights in Boise, Idaho bit.ly/2oHb0Vx. Individual points with brighter color correspond to lights having higher wattage. You can also see the locations of the lights with the highest wattage (top 15%). An article I've read claimed that Idaho was one of the states with highest population growth in 2017, so I found that interesting.
Population of some of the biggest cities in USA between 2010 and 2016 bit.ly/2HXbKPc. Tried to include Portland, but it showed the same growth pattern as Las Vegas, so that the two labels overlapped and I decided to leave this one out. Log scale was used on the y-axis.
Needed to restart my machine after an attempt to parse a 172MB JSON file. This is what happens when you try to describe Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's municipalities as a polygon with as many points as possible. The alternative could have been to use as few as needed, but it is hard to know after the fact which are the ones that truly matter. Shape simplification reduces memory requirements and may even prevent programs from quitting unexpectedly. You start to appreciate this when you are in the middle of an important 3D project and try moving individual vertices...
Wondering in what kind of condition this leaf was bit.ly/2HWBoDq. It's probably an extreme example, but it might explain why Seattle's fleet auction could be of interest to some bidders.
Locations of the wind turbines in Rostock, Germany bit.ly/2oHEy58
Art organisations in Ghent, Belgium bit.ly/2oGujyg
Ghent parking zones before/after bit.ly/2HVVTA8. The same idea applied to the residence zones bit.ly/2oGky36
Traffic at selected locations on the city ring R40 in Ghent, Belgium bit.ly/2HRP3vs
Buildings ranked by floor area in Freiburg, Germany bit.ly/2oDdUu8. Given that the dataset contains only schools the results are not surprising. What surprises is their number.
Number of tourist arrivals and tourist nights in Freiburg, Germany (1938 - 2015) bit.ly/2oBnw8S. The values for the Germans category are obtained as the difference between the total values minus the one for foreigners. If we divide the median number of nights by the median number of arrivals for both Germans and foreigners, we get 1.8839 vs. 1.5670 nights per arrived person. This means that historically seen, Germans tend to make better tourists, at least in Freiburg. But if we look at the last year only (2015), avoiding medians, the situation changes: 1.8392 vs. 2.0610. Relative to history, Germans have performed slightly worse, while foreigners have improved a lot. But it is unrealistic to assume that for such a long period all measurements have been subjected to the same criteria.
Number of walkers at 8 locations in Leeds (2017) bit.ly/2oDPZed (data by City Centre Management : bit.ly/2oEBO8P). Not sure how many times the data format has changed over time, so I tried not to look earlier than 2017. Even then, sometimes one of the columns was called "Location", sometimes "LocationName". In one case the date format was different from all other files (causing the script to break). Some dates were either missing or having "r"/"o" values. Most months had hourly measurements, while the last three had only daily totals. Such small inconsistencies made it hard to produce coherent results. Initially I looked only at the last month and was ready to confirm that Briggate registers the most walkers. However, after we normalize all months to daily totals, the picture becomes more blurry. But at least the band around 20000 walkers seems to be densest. The measurement values are said to be used for planning purposes.
An attempt to estimate the reduction in car value over time for the fleet of California bit.ly/2CsxrHj (data: bit.ly/2CqN566). The years of few disposition dates were given very far into the future (2713 and 3012) and I doubt that any car would have survived that long. The estimate shows that every 3 hours cost the taxpayer almost half a dollar per vehicle, the assumption being linear depreciation. Median car use time is formed as the median of the difference between disposition date and acquisition delivery date, converted to seconds. Chevrolet Impala LS seems like an interesting car and I wondered why so many were in the fleet. Then I went to the car maker's site to learn more and found that it was highly ranked in the publication "Consumer reports". Then went to see whether other car models get mentioned too and found that a new set of best cars was proposed for 2018 on the site bit.ly/2GRJ0WB. I expect that the final results would be membership only, but at least the proposals and the voting are public.
Found a curious fact: Leeds City Council might have to dispose its only Jaguar XJL Portfolio in slightly more than a week bit.ly/2GRvDWp (as indicated in the data from 07.12.2017, bit.ly/2CpLuxe). This probably hurts, but it shows how expensive car parks can be, especially when cars have to be used for 6 years at most. Most models have been indicated to use diesel and relatively few use petrol, hybrid or electric. Peugeout Partner, For Transit Custom 290L1 and Volkswagen CR50 Welfare Mellor seem to be the most common models. Overall, it is very common to see vans or minibuses, so I wonder whether this is specific for this park only or a practice followed by other City Councils as well. The median of all odometer readings comes at slightly less than 20000km.
Energy efficiency (£/m²/year) of some flats in Leeds in the past bit.ly/2Cr62p8. Contains information on a total of 48353 flats and uses two datasets: bit.ly/2GOXQx4 and bit.ly/2CpLVaX. Smaller points belong to less energy efficient flats. The bubble effect was not expected.
Visitors of the libraries in Leeds bit.ly/2BWpxof
Bicycle and green network in Toulouse, France bit.ly/2BRz7Jj
The municipalities of Grenoble, France bit.ly/2EY0qo3. Uses the "Les communes de la Métropole" dataset bit.ly/2BY5hma, produced by Grenoble-Alpes Métropole. I like the stepwise effect in the data, but the label positioning could certainly be better if done by hand.
Find an address in Aachen, Germany bit.ly/2EYz2q5. Quite slow, but works. If it finds the address, it will set a red point. If it doesn't it won't do anything.
Population of Aachen, Germany (official, 01.2011 - 09.2017) bit.ly/2EXC4La
Find the approximate position of streets in Halifax, Canada bit.ly/2EVCphi. Used a 46MB KML file for this demo. Initially wanted to make it an interactive SVG, letting the user type a street name to highlight the corresponding line segment within the map. Unfortunately, the resulting SVG became 16.8MB, which was still infeasible to use on a website. And since that SVG was already well touched, SVG compressors couldn't help much. Then I created a simple image out of the many SVG lines (reducing the lines opacity with the curves tool) with the idea to show only the entire line segment after the query is made. But I had to store all point coordinates in an array (avoiding a separate DB), and a multidimensional array didn't work well, exceeding the allowed script memory limit on the server. Then I converted it to a simple string to continue working on it. I noticed that most lines were really short, so this made me question how useful it is to have them inside the page when they can't be seen even with a higher than usual stroke width. Since the demo was only about approximate positions, I could compute only the centroid point of all points and substitute the many lines in the segment with a single point.
Land tax in Seine-Saint-Denis, France bit.ly/2oqNQU4
Total capacity of beds offered by merchants in Corsica bit.ly/2BRTgPm. Includes beds in all types of establishments.
Street lights by category in Bordeaux bit.ly/2BRkQMK. Not sure what all these abbreviations mean.
Libraries in Ontario, Canada by number of active cardholders, number of in-person visits, self-generated revenue and total operating revenues and expenditures for 2016 bit.ly/2osmAEw. Has some interesting results.
Gasoline prices (including tax) for some countries (01.01.2012 - 01.01.2018) bit.ly/2oqXNRg. I cannot confirm whether this is true or false as I cannot take the Canadian view.
Copenhagen's roads bit.ly/2BTRUnn. Didn't try to color-code the allowed speeds, because I'm not sure whether the data about them is still accurate. Had to look for the function of the large empty spot, so geographically I learned something new once again.
Sports facilities and halls in Copenhagen, Denmark bit.ly/2ETEA57
Restaurants in Berkeley which passed the inspections violation-free (07.01.2016 - 22.02.2018) bit.ly/2ETZGAd
Poverty lines for one and many-person households in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany (according to the new, median-based method) bit.ly/2BQvxPr
Natural monuments (mostly trees) in Bochum, Germany bit.ly/2orQed1. What happens in the middle of the figure is disturbing. Scaling could fix it, but then not all of the points on the periphery would be visible. Or they could be if the graphic is made sufficiently large, which would make it heavier. With images, whitespace often matters for the final size, which is very different from enforcing it through the use of margin/padding.
Bus network in Montpellier, France bit.ly/2BPq2Rc. You can see the names of all bus stations. Based on this, it seems that "Albert Einstein" is the eastmost station. Took some deep dive into data and extraction of relevant pieces from multiple files, composing them together at the end. Still slow and some points could eventually be removed. Since many of you seem to have liked the tube map of London, I hope that you will enjoy this one as well.
Utilization of some currently open parkings in Montpellier, France bit.ly/2oroNjx. You can also try to infer about the topology of the city by looking at its point addresses bit.ly/2BQzO5q
Impressions from places to eat/drink in Amsterdam bit.ly/2oq3f78
It happened multiple times to me that whenever I press Enter after having filled an input field, nothing happens. On the page I am currently seeing, pressing Enter a second time submits the data (not sure why). There is also a nearby button, but I need to focus it first and then press Enter again. Not only is this less direct, involving one more action, but it also interferes with my expectations. Using a mouse is another option, but the form has to work as much as possible regardless of the input method.
Annual percentage change in per share book value of Berkshire Hathaway and S&P with divident included (1965 - 2017) bit.ly/2BUG1gK. Saw the numbers at the start of the latest annual report and decided to look at them from a visual perspective. As you have seen here before, historic data can capture a lot of detail, not just help to create great diagrams.
Events in Amsterdam bit.ly/2BPjJgn. Has some really inspiring content and it is great to see data of such quality be made publicly accessible by Amsterdam Marketing. In my case, some of the content appeared not enclosed in a tag, which limits the opportunity to style it. Each entry uses different formatting and due to the large number of items, it is not possible to account for each individual case. But I hope that you'll find it useful even so.
The PyeongChang 2018 closing ceremony of the Olympic Games was really impressive, even on screen. Thank you for making it possible and for sharing your exceptional performance with the world. Everyone who participated, sent a strong message for peace and togetherness. And that hard work really matters and is more visible than ever. Feeling pumped and trying to imagine how Beijing 2022 would extend on this theme.
How easy people can opt out from your newsletter is also a design choice, whether you realize it or not.
New strategy of some well-known websites: show visitors third-party ads, skillfully embedded within the content after every 4-5 paragraphs of text. The browsing experience is best described through a periodic pattern of jank. But sometimes you believe that the site is actually usable.
The theater in Bonn, Germany has published data on the number of visitors in categories opera, dance and spectacle. Unfortunately the data is spurious and it is simply missing for many months. For some months it was provided in bulk, which necessitates spreading the numbers across them by taking the averages. Tried to plot the data to see its pattern bit.ly/2BQyiR2.
Migration saldos within Cologne for various parts of the city (2010 - 2015) bit.ly/2or3kqU. The densest area is between 0 and 200, indicating that most parts of the city saw a slightly positive internal migration. Yet, as you can see, some regions lost citizens during all six years, where even the best performing regions couldn't entirely compensate for that. This is interesting.
Origin of the tourists in Graz as reported from accomodations (1996 - 2012) bit.ly/2ooEZC5. Didn't include all possible origins, but only the ones with the highest median values over time. Hopefully the figure looks cleaner this way. Austria without Vienna is where most people came from, with Germany and Vienna following. Italy appears before some Austrian' states, which is slightly surprising for me.
Libraries in Graz, Austria bit.ly/2BOjrGs
Hourly weather forecast for some cities in Norway bit.ly/2EPZ0fg
Number of doctors per 10000 people in Hong Kong bit.ly/2BPuAXS. Had an idea for this unusual scale. But it could be that many other countries have even lower rates. It is worth trying to understand what the reasons behind such a development are, and it probably won't work unless we can "put ourselves in other people's shoes" to see what their true concerns are.
Top 4 crime incident types by neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota bit.ly/2BLuTCU and when they tend to happend during the day bit.ly/2ongjKd
Adopted revenue and expense amounts in some categories from the Saint Paul's budget (2014-2018) bit.ly/2EO5tHq. With the exception of 2017, when expenses for full time salaries and wages were very high, the two highest revenue sources seem to be able to cover some of the highest expenses.
Knew what the directions SE, SW, NE and NW mean, but never heard about NEE, SEE, NWW, SWW, NNW, NNE, SSW and SSE before. Good that such a compass exists bit.ly/2EOJgcx. Saw GPS data from cars that had these directions in addition to the geocoordinates and speeds of the cars. Perhaps this is enough to create some visual vector field, but until I try and see how well it works, I cannot say for sure. Update: Although it seems to work bit.ly/2EO0BSP, it took more than an hour of computation. Additionally, I made two mistakes. I forgot to make the points smaller (they were left at 5 pixels each) and the vector length now seems suboptimal (which I couldn't know in advance of seeing the big picture). Most vectors are barely visible and the two regions have far too much overlapping. But at least it is possible. Fixing this would take too much time once again and likely won't add much value, so I'll spend time on something else instead. The data is periodically updated, so please think about this as a snapshot in time.
Locations of the 311 (non-emergency) service requests in Cincinnati since 2012 bit.ly/2EKTfiI. Some darker spots are identifiable on the map. Metal/furniture, tall grass growing on private properties, trash/litter and potholes seem to be frequent complaints. Didn't spend time to fix the formatting.
"London property is worth more than Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, and Edinburgh combined." Not surprising if you looked at the figure with the relative populations of these cities that I made a while ago. London appeared almost shockingly bigger than the rest. So different, that I couldn't easily let go of the belief that I was having a mistake.
Median avg. daily traffic at various locations in New Jersey (2009-2015) bit.ly/2CF8wf4. With lots of data, it is relatively slow to obtain results.
Between 01.1985 and 11.2017, the passenger saldo of Adelaide airport is most negative with Auckland (New Zeland) and Denpasar (Indonesia), meaning that much more people left in these directions than came from them. On the other side, most people came from Singapore (Singapore), Hong Kong (Hong Kong, SAR) and to a much lesser extent from Tokyo (Japan), Bangkok (Thailand) and Los Angeles (USA). For Sydney airport, the situation looks different. Most people left it in direction Osaka (Japan), Tokyo (Japan), Dallas (USA), Auckland (New Zealand), Los Angeles (USA), Nagoya (Japan), San Francisco (USA), Fukuoka (Japan) and to a lesser extent in direction London (UK), Vancouver (Canada), Seoul (Korea), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and Beijing (China). Most passengers came from Singapore (Singapore), Bangkok (Thailand), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Honolulu (USA), Hong Kong (Hong Kong), Shanghai (China), Manila (Philippines), Johannesburg (South Africa) and Christchurch (New Zealand). At least this is what working with the dataset "International airlines - traffic by city pairs" bit.ly/2ELadxw suggests. Data is provided for many Australian airports, although there are some notes about it as well.
Comparison of passenger movements with domestic airlines at the top 10 Australian airports bit.ly/2ELzaZM
Learned the hard way that simply having files about routes, shapes, stops, transfers and trips might not be not sufficient to construct the lines corresponding to each route with the stops ordered in sequence, given their latitude and longitude (SVG-interactive). In the files I obtained, information about many stops was missing. But this data format seems to exist at many places, so it must be exported from some kind of software. Perhaps it is a matter of a setting to export data that is more cohesive.
Median sea level rise by month at Fort Pulaski (01.07.1935 - 01.08.2016) bit.ly/2CDL029. The total sum of all rises and falls comes at -52.46, while the median of these medians is -0.062. This means that during the period, the place had a net loss in water resources.
In November 2017, most flights at the Phoenix airport were served by American Airlines (14312), followed by Southwest Airlines (9828). American Airlines had its passengers wait at gates A1, B9 and A3 most often, while passengers of Southwest Airlines had to wait at gates C1, C3 and C9 most often. Both used terminal 4 for all their flights. Looking at a geometric model of the airport bit.ly/2CFhOaZ, we see that the locations of the gates at which the two companies served most often are almost opposing; the C gates are in a geometrically smaller area, which seems to have fewer dining opportunities/stores. In terms of number of flights registered, other airlines are much less represented. Delta Airlines had 1741 flights and United Airlines had 50 flights less than that. The data was provided by the City of Phoenix.
Museums in Brussels bit.ly/2CDNaia. The name "Musee du Cacao et du Chocolat" immediately grabbed my attention. Hopefully, the building can withstand the summer temperatures.
Bike availability in Brussels bit.ly/2CEbbpn
Public art supported by the city of Brussels (29.03.2017) bit.ly/2EKcfOh. Wanted to also include geocoordinates, the titles of the works and their creators. Turns out that only half of the images had information attached to them and many titles were missing.
Entry in the German Digital Bibliothek (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek) from the last month bit.ly/2sJMGHH when I registered. Then, after watching a very inspirational trailer about Australian animal life, I wondered why it took me so long. But Gandhi's thinking has frequently touched me in a positive sense, so at some point I decided that owning his autobiography "The story of my experiments with truth" would be worth it. That was indeed the case.
Parks always seemed to help me in one way or another when I became overly emotional. For some they also serve as a source of inspiration during idea generation. So they've made the walks part of their daily routine.
Recreation visits of some national parks in USA (1979 - 2018) bit.ly/2sLmH2D. Some nice periodicity here. Yellowstone visits seem to fluctuate most. In low-activity months, Yosemite seems to be visited slightly more often than Rocky Mountain, but in high-activity ones it is often the other way around.
I have always been neutral regarding Brexit. Everyone has the right to decide after all and I think that this is great. What I am no longer neutral about is the degree to which some people think that they can serve Europeans any type of grass they like, whenever they like it. I mean the latest speech about postponing the event, given all the years dedicated to preparation—the almost one-year period given to organize the referendum itself and the years so far after that. I thought that everything about Brexit has been said before, but the theme returns indefinitely in the media. The consequences of this affect the lives of citizens like me across Europe who day after day live without knowing what to expect. In a sense, UK became the European "Trojan horse", because whether in or out, they can expect to use all advantages of that. It is hard to withstand such hypocrisy; I wonder if it would have been better if Britain left the EU immediately without even waiting for the referendum and without having time to prepare. The reason for this is simple: if someone told you you were a lesser person than they are, you probably wouldn't wait three years for them to change their mind. Such strong words once expressed cannot be forgotten and are sufficient to end any relationship no matter how strong it was in the past. On the spot. Because "saving face" is the smallest sign of any person with self-esteem. Currently I am not seeing the EU saving the face of its citizens. Instead, the EU is selling their patience by postponing and further discounts. Especially when you hear how at the back of the same people who ask about further postponement another group is still continuing to speak negatively about people from particular countries within the EU. What an arrogance! And if inaction about Brexit depends on another European country, be it Germany, France or any other where someone has interest in extending the conversation bis Sankt Nimmerleinstag, I would happily ask to see their exits as well. Because no decision can be final as long as the cousin of one arrogance remains within the Union...
"Crowdsourcing is more effective, because many ideas are accumulated, cheaper, because you don't have to pay and more efficient, because it gives you an external point of view." Well, if the percentage of companies which crowdsourced work the last year has become that big, they should not be surprised for not getting the results they wished for. Good results that involve other people and their time have to be earned and there is no exception from this rule. By crowdsourcing, your company actively signals your people that they don't matter much, potentially hiding the need for contracts or other taxable activities. With so many insidiuos people, it's no surprise that crowdsourcing is growing.
Have you noticed how locally-created, handcrafted data, limited only to the features you need in your application is much faster to compute with compared with the data you obtain from external sources, which have much more than you would ever need? The difference can be significant in terms of computation time: the first might take you only a couple of seconds, while the second enters the minutes category. (Working with lots of data is not fast in general and producing graphics is even slower.) It is also not hard to see some genius usage patterns based on this, where people define only a couple of variables and skillfully change their values within a loop, avoiding array pushes and still achieving their goal. Such high-quality work is a pure pleasure to see. Also reminds me of the pruning strategy described in the dictionary of techniques.
An idea worth remembering: instead of placing long labels next to your data points, you could place numbers and indicate in the legend which number corresponds to which label. This may reduce label-label and label-point overlaps, making your graphic cleaner. But even this won't work with too many labels/label categories.
I often read seemingly unrelated things, which some people would accuse me that they do not have a lot to do with programming or design. But it is hard for me to enoy the company of pure programmers, who beside reading and writing only code in some languages plus knowing some frameworks have neither time nor understanding or interest for much else. I wonder what such great programming skills are for when people have no understanding about the contexts in which they are good to apply. Or wait for someone else to explain how their skills should be translated into products. In my opinion, good programming is as much about working with clients as it is about being self-sufficient and still generating work (preferably that matters) when the clients aren't there. Many companies seem to be interested in creating "dedicated", one-sided people, since this allows them to gain some efficiencies. But I always felt that this interfered with my work and made me dumber over time. (Turns out what is good for companies is moslty bad for me.) So I force myself to read unrelated things, which is why you see the hundreds of bits on this page after all. The more multi-disciplinary I can make my own thinking, the better and more empowered I feel. Which then seeks the next form of expression, either here or elsewhere.
If in the electronic age you find yourself filling 8-page formulars by hand, then something is ripe for innovation.
How often do look at your access logs? All logs in their entirety, not just for the current month. Do you know how you can see a global graphic, related to the entire period and not just one related to the current month? Writing 20 lines of code to parse the logs and organize the information in a way you want to see it is not that difficult. And understanding who your customers are is more valuable that looking at the noise that most robots generate.
Triangle overcomes an obstacle bit.ly/2EVmyhL. Would be harder on a full vertex stomach.
As an author, would you charge both the transmitter and receiver of information shared by word-of-mouth? After all, this is another form of copying, which directly influences the sales numbers.
Another option is showing fragments of the book online, including a nearby link to purchase the book in case the reader wants to know more. But this option won't work for everyone, because it requires a machine and experience in using it, Internet connection and the willingness to stay long hours in front of the screen. This is why the function and place of the libraries is so important even today. They ensure that any person—the socially excluded, the lonely, the homeless, the illiterate, the disabled, the ill—have access to knowledge that spans into new worlds, capable of positively impacting, perhaps even changing their lives. If an author believes that someone's last hope to change should be taken away from them, they are free to proceed. But raising the lowest bar instead of expanding the pool of available knowledge and intensifying its spreading seems counterintuitive to me.
Sad to read about a new public movement against libraries with the goal to have them pay the author every time their book is borrowed by a reader. Some authors expressed concerns about readers not acknowledging their rights, copying their books after borrowing them. This is of course illegal and does true harm to the authors. But I cannot support a model that attempts to punish all readers, just because few were acting bad. I believe that the libraries have a social function and need to be as open as possible. Authors who give a book to the local library also express their agreement with this function (that is, beside other things they also choose to serve and contribute, which is of highest honor); if they disagree, noone could blame them if they took their work elsewhere. Or maybe even sell it online through their own channel. If the libraries were charged per book borrowed, this could transfer the costs to the readers, making reading itself accessible only to a more limiited audience. Having readers pay proportionally to the number of titles they borrow could reduce interest in reading overall. At the end, this would affect the authors, because fewer readers in general would mean fewer readers specifically for their books, fewer chances to spread the word and to get known. To get known through the quality of work and not through the loudness of voice.
"NYC street trees by species" bit.ly/2EVDgOb ↗. Beautiful, scalable and interactive.
Speaking of busses today, a person no longer among us used to say that it's important to ensure that the right people are on the bus and that they are on the right seats. Unclear how many drivers are actively thinking about this.
When serving and deserving intersect, all sides can be happy. Some people call it a "win-win" situation.
If you are waiting for someone to knock on your door, you aren't really looking for professionals.
Daily bus ridership by route in Chicago (01.01.2001 - 30.11.2017) bit.ly/2BH8GGe. The sudden line that builds towards the end of the period might indicate that either the measurement methodology has changed or other bus lines which were previously missing have started to appear. We see that bus line number 79 has registered the highest median ridership, having almost 4000 travelers more per day than bus line number 9 (the second on the list). You can also see the special case of a line fit to the data points of bus number 79 bit.ly/2C94fEP
Finding combinations of ingredients based on good pairs bit.ly/2C6E2a9
Sometimes you need an entire process to apply the correct sequence of regular expressions to transform the data to a format for further processing (still at it). Although regexes can be hard to design and debug initially, you might find that the time investment is worth it once you consider how many hours of typing and editing this saves you.
Some of the world's biggest libraries ranked by their catalog size bit.ly/2C6mScL
Car auctions may have many car models on offer, which in case of no interest, start to take lots of physical space (there is a need to keep inventory low in general) and rust over time. The more cars potential buyers can see, the less interest they can show in each additional one. (Rust is scary too.) From the seller's point of view, the right application can make the sales process smoother, so that the time between the arrival and the sale of the car is minimized. From the client's point of view, it can be helpful to arrive with a good understanding of what one is looking for. For instance, if you look at the Kansas City monthly car auction, you can set your filtering criteria to see only more recent cars instead of going through the long list or hoping that your physical presence will help you decide bit.ly/2BAJUY3. As you can see, we still have no information about the mileage, but now there are only a dozen of cars we have to look at instead of hundreds. The more information you have upfront, the more informed your choice can be.
An attempt to show some vehicle average speeds in five boroughs of New York bit.ly/2BA9yfq
Nature of the police deparment phone calls in Jersey City (01.01.2014 - 31.03.2017) bit.ly/2ByO9n2. The streets from where most calls where registered were Bergen Ave (17047), Central Ave (14603) and 7th St. (12605).
Parks in Vancouver by area in hectares bit.ly/2ByGvsJ. Looking at the points, I clicked on Stanley park first. You can also see a model of the parks in Jersey City bit.ly/2BwIT3n
In the titles of works associated with Shakespeare, which were produced between 1564 and 1616 and kept in the British Library, the word "Denmark" appears 17 times. I think I only encountered it once while reading in my younger years.
If you can get your function right, you can draw things from points bit.ly/2C4j0cg similarly to the beautiful, animated figures you saw in the sky at the Olympic Games opening ceremony. It won't look that good, but at least your overhead will be low compared to sending thousands of drones in the sky, controlling their behavior in real-time, accounting for wind fluctuations and ensuring that not a single one falls due to a depleted battery for the duration of the entire performance.
A single loop iterates three times to compute variance, skewness and kurtosis for a given numeric sequence bit.ly/2C1wghD
Gov.uk has published a report on smoking bit.ly/2o5lm21, containing the following infographics bit.ly/2C2FHNT about smoking prevalence among Europeans. As you can see not all Europeans are as lucky as UK and Sweden. But that well-intentioned friends beat strangers in how harmful their help could be to your child's health, this comes as a lightning strike. Sufficient to make you want to review your child's friends list.
When adults over 40 were asked whether they had any near visual impairment, considering all responses across all US states, the median of the confirmation rate comes at 36% (Source: bit.ly/2Bxvyrs). Scary number and possibily implication-rich for many web and visual designers.
Average kWh per customer per day for suburbs of Sydney (2009 - 2015) bit.ly/2BwfAh9, according to Ausgrid. The company changed the methodology significantly in 2016, so these results were not included in order to avoid playing with fire. Still, the trend towards reduction in the consumption of electricity look positive in the region.
Air quality measurements in Port Augusta, Australia (03.01.2017 - 01.01.2018) bit.ly/2o2r2tz. I left a couple of quite extreme values out of view for the first two figures as I suspect that they might be due to incorrect measurements (in the first month the sensors seem to have needed some calibration time). If you look carefully, you'll see that some points are ordered almost as bars. This could means that some high values were not only quite similar, but they also occured close in time. The interval at which the measurements were made was one hour.
Free Wi-Fi locations in Grenoble, France (15.01.2017) bit.ly/2BvN7YM. The author of this dataset said that they are open to improved localization. Perhaps (if you live in this city) you know what could be improved.
Visitors by library in Grenoble (2008 - 2016) bit.ly/2sxdV8m. Two libraries were not included, since one was having a label, but no measurements and another one had measurements, but no label. We see that in more recent years, Bibliothèque Centre Ville had slightly more visitors than the Grand Place. As you have learned already, most libraries still continue to be worth visiting despite the claims that Internet has taken their place. And they are often very interesting places to lose yourself. Holding a printed book is quite different from reading on screen. If you have the chance, take a look at a place close to you.
Parking places in Grenoble, France bit.ly/2C0olkJ. Expected to be able to fill some polygons to see areas, but only lines were provided. Attempting to construct polygons from two individual points (assuming they are top left and bottom right) resulted in a wrong visualization. But at least I learned not to attempt plotting the data as polygon unless its type has been explicitly specified so.
Street light locations in Zürich bit.ly/2C2aZod
Some subareas of the state Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France bit.ly/2o0279U
Tourist bike paths in Jena, Germany bit.ly/2BxFHoe. Most subpaths seem to be accessible from a single, main path.
Nice visualization of the current air quality in Hamburg bit.ly/2BwGJkl ↗
Remember that if you need someone to work on your project, you can always visit my contact page.
Coordinates of charging stations for electric cars in Hamburg, Germany bit.ly/2BZMAiW. This represents only the biggest cluster, but there are more stations on the periphery. Couldn't include them all, because this would make the individual points indistinguishable. Hopefully, you'll still find the updates useful.
Air quality at air stations in Minsk, Belarus (2008 - 2015) bit.ly/2Buo8VQ. Approximate only as some values were given as "<0.5" or ">0.5".
Landslides worldwide bit.ly/2BWH3tH. Avalanches also seem to fall in the same category. But sometimes you decide that you can't wait for hours for all historical data.
Hub height and total height from some wind turbine proposals in Aberdeenshire, UK bit.ly/2BXEebH. As expected, the total height is slightly shifted to the right, but it was nice to see how the distributions overlap.
Street lights in Dundee, UK bit.ly/2BXqWvF. We can see where the most consuming ones are. The lights labeled "INDO PLLS", "Designplan Quadrant LED" and "Urbis Albany LED" were not included in the graphic as they didn't have their wattage specified. Yet they make only 0.37% of all (25049) existing lights. In case all were turned on, this would consume ≈1.765264MWh.
Comparison of the average number of underground journeys per passenger in London and Glasgow (1982 - 2016) and the average miles per passenger bit.ly/2BZB7QE
Pharmacies and medical facilities in Prague bit.ly/2srZ7b9
Average and projected forest fire danger bit.ly/2BYz6E8. Source: European Environment Agency (EEA).
Average domestic electricity consumption in Kingston upon Hull, compared to England bit.ly/2stJOi3
Green roofs by area in Amsterdam bit.ly/2BXOeBO
Parking place utilization in Amsterdam bit.ly/2sr754l
Merging data pieces from separate, fictive sensors into common observations bit.ly/2BT3XSs
Found this nice CPU-GPU comparison of capabilities bit.ly/2BprvgH
Element-wise multiplication of two 10000x10000 matrices (A[i,j] * B[i,j]) filled with random numbers from 10 to 100 ran in 3.176s in C# (best of 3), N/A in pure Python and 1.542s in Numpy (best of 3) on my machine. Ahtough Numpy is surprisingly fast, some libraries building on top of it still deliver N/A.
Learning from UNESCO's Transparency Portal bit.ly/2Bpu7et
Have you checked latest Chrome? Has a great new function for restoring accidentally closed tabs. Wanted to press Ctrl + T and type the address again, but pressed Ctrl + Shift + T and this made the closed tab reappear with its content again.
Spirals in Vega20 (colors scheme) bit.ly/2Bnim8p. You can also see the math specifics used to create them.
Mixing four types of coffee programmatically bit.ly/2BWoYf8 (some people like to drink mixes). "Java is a type of coffee from the island of Java, Indonesia". I knew about the island, but not about the coffee. And I neither drink coffee, nor have I found myself write in Java. But the elegance of C# code and the helpfulness of the compiler have started to speak to me. The long screens of cryptic and hard to read errors in C++ and Python mean that it takes a lot of time to simply decode what went wrong. Yet, I haven't found a way to scrape content from the web with C# so far—getting an error that a DLL is missing where my platform isn't Windows. But I noticed that C# tends to perform well with frequent compilations of relatively small programs, which is desirable when testing small algorithms and gradually scaling them to large input sizes.
Gradient path in 8x8 matrix bit.ly/2BReRZ9
Projected cancer prevalence by state and sex at all cancer sites, all ages in USA for 2017 bit.ly/2BjIlxE. The year has already passed, but the visualization could still be interesting.
Married and never-married people by neighborhood in Vancouver bit.ly/2Bkkuho
Chicago buildings energy performance (as of 08.02.2018) bit.ly/2BQehL3
Chicago traffic congestion by region bit.ly/2BPvd4l. Note that this reflects my own understanding of the data.
Enplanements at the top 50 U.S. airports in 2016 (comparison) bit.ly/2BN8LJ2. I was not able to zoom the map on the right so as to see all circles on it. At that scale it has many overlapping data points. The image on the left has fewer overlaps, but is not feature-rich (missing map, no color). You can also see a bar chart that gives another view bit.ly/2BQQY3T
Europeans in risk of poverty and social exclusion (08.02.2018) bit.ly/2BjT4YQ
HIV prevalence in selected countries (ages 15-49, 1990 - 2011) bit.ly/2BjfCc9
Wind characteristics at three locations in San Francisco area (2009 - 2016) bit.ly/2BPDsxp. Selected Warnerville Switchyard (Oakdale), Pulgas Reservoir (San Mateo) and Pier 40 (Pier 40) out of the many options, because they had data for most years. Made the mistake to attempt converting the times to datetime objects after which my machine became too slow and then failed at that operation once the datetimes containing the "?" symbol started to appear. Since the goal probably was not to know the exact times, I decided to visualize the whole as a long time series sorted by year and the order in which the information was provided in the files. The data has been collected at five-minute intervals. I cannot compare with the rest of the stations, but it seems to me that Pier 40 has registered good wind velocities by relatively constant wind direction.
Energy efficiency of some facilities by building category in San Francisco (as of 16.02.2016) bit.ly/2BhliUa. You can also see a visualization of newer data on the energy use intensity of some hotels, offices and retail stores in San Francisco (18.01.2018) bit.ly/2BmAOhk. Didn't expect that I would be creating buildings from buildings.
Schools in San Francisco by grade range bit.ly/2BkBp3p
Finding the inventors of selected inventions bit.ly/2BNnPpZ
VBB routes in Berlin bit.ly/2skabXy. Said to be valid only for the last year. Quite noisy since every route received its own color. Took some time to compute.
Phone calls to the 311 system regarding missed trash collection in Washington DC in the last 30 days (08.02.2018) bit.ly/2sjwBbq. You can also see the locations of all service requests during the last month bit.ly/2sbWrhq or of all requests since 2009 bit.ly/2EqPLRx (you may need to zoom).
Loan modification seems to be a very frequent complaint customers have about some banks. Mortgage, debt collection, credit reporting and credit card are the top product categories where customers complained, to a slightly lesser extent about student and consumer loans. Source bit.ly/2EqhtxN
It makes me happy to see small cities (like Buda, Texas and others) transmitting videos from their City Council meetings and other public events to inform everyone what's going on. In many big cities transparency is either often missing or an afterthought.
t-SNE on DXOMark digital camera data bit.ly/2EopMdD
Finding the routes of departing flights at LaGuardia airport at the morning of 07.02.2018 bit.ly/2EnBdSR
Seeking information about the route from Frankfurt/Main to Berlin led me to this map on DB's website bit.ly/2EpY1Bm. At least I don't need to plot that path now (like I did once before), but it is surprising to see a map with so much noise. Should secondary routes appear in saturated red?
The pushAll() method in JavaScript reminds me about array_push() in PHP, extend() in Python and emplace_back() in C++. I wouldn't even think about consistency.
A dot-line plan for the week bit.ly/2sfHHhB
Tetromino mapping between boxes bit.ly/2BHDZBr
Do you set the "async" attribute on your "script" tags? This might be useful in certain cases. For instance, if you want to prevent users from accessing your "subscription only" content. When you send many megabytes to them and consult many third parties, your "until here" popup message may take a while to appear. During that time, anyone who has loaded the article content entirely (but waits for the ads), can press the Escape key. Now your script won't continue executing, so your popup message won't appear at all. These might seem minor things, but they make an impression.
Do you read master theses now and then? If not, you probably missed things like this hive diagram bit.ly/2BdEdiw
Center of mass for multiple masses bit.ly/2BJF0Jh. Beautiful formulas always deserve a demo. If we increase the mass of a point, it starts pulling the center towards itself.
I like the idea of subtle gesture control more than voice control to manage devices in a home setting. Voice can irritate people like me who try to stay focused most of the time, repeated words lose their meaning or produce noise, which doesn't follow the least interference principle. Imagine someone is sleeping while the TV is running and you issue a voice command to turn it off. I hope that we'll find ways to decrease the noise rather than increasing it, but it very well could be that these technologies improve beyond recognition so this is no longer an issue.
Wondering why someone would detect snowflakes in an image. Perhaps they installed a sensor to detect movements outside and they fear that the snowflake might pass through the box and fall on the processor... There must be some case for the kind of worry you associate with a snowflake when you choose to track it, be it visually or not. Otherwise it would be doing it, because it's cool.
Still remembering from my short visit in Germany (because now I consider it this way) how I was trying to use Excel and Typo3, mostly failing and crying. Either I couldn't understand what the CEO wanted or he was incapable of explaining it. Most of the things I heard during my first two weeks had the nature of constant yelling. I wasn't alone there, but this behavior somehow seemed to impress me most. After two weeks I could no longer endure it and left. But it brings back these memories whenever I see that in 2018 German companies still hire for that thing called Typo3. I hoped to stop looking at its face, yet it insists advertising itself to me directly bit.ly/2nJ3R6l. Needless to say, you won't get the chance to hire me for Typo3 work anymore.
"We are hiring" sends the specific signal that your company neither cares who they hire nor how. The only thing that matters is hiring cheaply, since you've let ten people come at the interview at the same time, asking them about their expectations, with the full knowledge that they'll have to underbid each other if they want to get the offer. Your job is to make as many people as possible willing to make themselves comparable (and cheap). Unfortunately, with this mindset, you'll never see me at your interview (I neither make myself comparable nor cheap). If your company can't prove that they need exactly me and not someone else, then being there is not worth my time and skills. If you aren't already chasing the star performers in your industry, this makes me seriously concerned about your future and the stability of your company. Who wants to work at a place that may not exist two years from now? And why should a random person even care about your company when the cost of sending you an additional CV has fallen below a cent? Continue to hire the way you do.
CO₂ emissions in 1000 tons from primary energy consumption (German provinces, 2014) bit.ly/2nIvqg5. Back then, Nordrhein-Westfalen seemed to need a lot of improvement, especially in the brown coal category.
An attempt to understand the demographic picture in Munich bit.ly/2DYS8eW. Omitted the translations since these are not interesting to me (I understand German too).
Gloucester City Council expenditure by expenditure type between February 2017 and December 2017 bit.ly/2nIy85l
Comparison of daily electricity consumption at three different places in Glasgow (01.01.2013 - 12.05.2015) bit.ly/2nJ02OK
Made another demo on parking place utilization, this time for car parks in Glasgow. Unfortunately, after the fact I noticed that it won't work on this server, so I recorded a video instead bit.ly/2E1hvNj. Currently "Concert Square Car Park" is busiest with 88.8% utilization.
Looking at a contour plot and thinking how it could be useful to describe the extent at which an earthquake is felt at various distances from the origin, attaching a value to each bounded area. I associate this also with kernel density estimation.
A picture could be: a yellow tape along the door frame with the black label "Keep it clean Keep it clean Keep it clean...". Above the door a big circular hole in the wall, an arrow pointing to it and its description "Throw junk here". Below the picture, the unique selling proposition: "Solving most of the household's problems at the entrance".
Wrote a small script to see which graphics cards are good at memory bandwidth per watt-price (on the Kaggle dataset). Correction: I made the mistake to forget normalizing the values first. Now the various models of Radeon RX 480 8GB, each offering 256GB/s bandwidth, move to positions 4-8 instead of 11-14 as mentioned previously, while the 12GB "Titan" labeled cards, offering much higher bandwidth still appear almost at the end of the ranking. As before, see this criteria only as personal preference rather than recommendation.
You can count how many people walked over a particular location at a store/event and then create a heatmap showing the places of highest interest. I suspect that central locations or common paths would be red most often, yet this can serve as a relative measure for the interestingness of other locations. Also nice is that no personal idenity data is collected this way.
Amazon numbers from quarterly financial results (2014 - 2017) bit.ly/2nDZwBH
Canon sales by region (2008 - 2017) bit.ly/2nEUrZD
Learning from ships operating at the port of Hamburg bit.ly/2nCirwF
The median time to resolve a 311 service request case in Boston between 01.07.2011 and 31.01.2018 computed to almost five hours. Most requests came from Dorchester (175193), Roxbury (105398) and Allston/Brighton (84986). The most frequent locations were 1 City Hall Plz in Boston (2037), various streets/intersections in Downtown/Financial District, 139 Tremont St in Boston (352), the intersections Berkeley St & E Berkeley St (301) and Columbus Ave & Dartmouth St (282) in South End, the intersection Brighton Ave & Harvard Ave in Allston/Brighton (300), the intersections Massachusetts Ave & Newbury St (298) and Massachusetts Ave & Huntington Ave (288) in Back Bay as well as 835 Huntington Ave in Mission Hill (274). Here you can see a map of all service requests during the period bit.ly/2nAeAjx (high-frequency areas are darker) or the median duration in hours by case type bit.ly/2nDTu42.
Counting occurences after bin fitting of values bit.ly/2DSrp3P
BogoMIPS/Mhz for some old CPUs bit.ly/2nz0n6o
An attempt to detect the corners of a wind turbine in an image bit.ly/2nwmFFW. The FAST algorithm picks up noise to a varying degree and now we have to find another algorithm to remove it... Photo by Johny Goerend.
When someone sends a GPS-trackable package, they can see the trajectory which it follows and identify any delivery inefficiencies which would increase the least squares deviation from the straight path and thus increase the delivery time. The receiver of the package has the right to know where it is and not just see when it arrives at given points (like post offices). If data is captured only there, any delay experienced between two stations would remain intransparent to the recipient.
Tracking the trajectories of six Columba livia pigeons over time bit.ly/2DSSbJt. I expected to see more random movements, but it seems that the pigeons frequently returned to a place they preferred (possibly the location of release). Some lines seem to overlap, which means that they moved through the same route more than once, which is interesting. Also see the original description of this Movebank dataset, which contains data about 35 pigeons bit.ly/2nxMpll. What this attempted to illustrate is how we could map the trajectories of moving objects, animals or people.
One advantage of sticking the code to the result is that when the browser updates and the result disappears, the code is still there, fail-safe and waiting for someone to be adapted. Expecting the creator to rework the same small demo repeatedly, independent of creation date, whenever needed, is asking too much. Every creation lives in its time and timeliness of appreciation is the only support it gets.
Trying to make sense of the data found in the book "Scale" by Geoffrey West led me to create this plot "Equivalence between earthquake magnitude and tons of TNT (log scale)" bit.ly/2DRcjvs. Especially enjoyed the comparisons and how different scale exponents were assigned to different entities/organisms in life. Despite seeing only a fragment of the whole book, this alone is enough to recommend it if you haven't seen it.
Notice that I never claimed that any of my work is error-free. Look at it with a degree of scepticism. It is just the type of work I could do at that particular moment, under some specific circumstances, given some specific knowledge/skills/understanding. I am sure that you would be able to pinpoint some of my mistakes if you looked carefully enough. Is this reason to stop trying and improving? I don't think so. Everyone makes mistakes, but we have to learn from them and still move on.
Street segments pavement condition index scores in Palo Alto, California (2013) bit.ly/2DT8gOY. It would have been nice to learn how the condition has changed since then.
Disc bit.ly/2nrTTq4
Number of business days between two dates: print(np.busday_count('2018-02-02', '2018-02-14')) # 8. Looking at the calendar, this doesn't seem to include the end date. In cases you hear that something will happen "in fifteen business days", the current date is 05.02.2018, and you wonder when the end date will come, you can use print(np.busday_offset('2018-02-05', 15)) # 2018-02-26
Weighted average to select a service provider based on past experience bit.ly/2npkJPy
LED street lights by their wattage in Mountain View, California bit.ly/2npNUlp. Lights shining stronger are very often placed at road intersections.
"You made it" from the new public art dataset by the city of Vancouver bit.ly/2DLbp3l. Although I never knew what "it" refered to. But it looks nice.
Thank you for kernel 4.15, whoever and wherever you are.
Using morphological operations to see further bit.ly/2nndZBN
Observing sample image data in the form of a 3D cube bit.ly/2no5u9l. Some interesting "dotted lines" here.
The tallest buildings in the world in a bar chart bit.ly/2DJZoLH
Jobs by the city of Ottawa bit.ly/2DHpMpm
The most common tree types in Ottawa, Canada bit.ly/2nnh9Wi. Still finding new types.
Median apartment rents in different Singapore towns (Q2 2005 - Q3 2017) bit.ly/2nn1tlU. It seems that the higher the number of rooms, the more the median rent varies. We can also see the distributions of the median rents for each town/region bit.ly/2nl5jvM. Now it becomes visible how much higher the median rents for instance in the central region were compared with the rest. Data about Lim Chu Kang was not available.
Had a strange idea, but it didn't work out as expected. Generate 12 sequences of numbers that have similar within-sequence values, but very dissimilar between-sequence values. Shuffle the entire matrix to destroy the structure and apply Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to attempt separating the original sources. What this gave me was a block-matrix with most values negative and only some positive, slightly over zero. Not sure how to proceed from there and whether I used the right tool for the job. I expected to see some indices which tell me which values belong together. Here is what I did bit.ly/2nhWoep
If reading a lot of data is often less time-consuming than writing it (I/O), would you say that receiving data via Wi-Fi would be less energy-consuming than transmitting it? Once you see the numbers, you start seeing the hints.
Some time ago, an article mentioned that when trains arrive >6 mins late, DB considered them overdue. I was wondering why exactly this number. A recent reminder about the concept of a band and a given number of standard deviations around some mean led me to believe that 6 mins could be somehow connected to the mean of the data they have observed, placing the two dotted lines at mean+6 and mean-6 accordingly. This would mean, at least visually, that if a case is crossing the dotted line, it is considered extreme—with the observation having the nature of an outlier. But, of course, I can't really know, so this is only an assumption.
Covariance between the individual channels of an image bit.ly/2DGkOt4
Speaking of hygiene, someone mentioned that good payment is merely a hygienic factor for workers. They see it as the most basic requirement when deciding whether to stay in a company or leave. But too often, companies aren't keeping even this elementary hygiene level. The results should not surprise.
Food hygiene ratings of restaurants, canteens and cafes in Brighton and Hove, UK bit.ly/2ni5ZBZ
When someone recommends using Qt5 with a resource-constrained, embedded device, a picture of an elephant trying to walk-balance on a rope appears in my mind. Could be very well possible, but as always I never stop questioning.
Didn't know that Paris was flooded. And yesterday I was plotting fountains.
Comparison of specific attributes from the specifications of three models Phillips 4K TVs bit.ly/2DHVPFJ
Water quality sampling locations in Austin, Texas bit.ly/2DEumVF
Austin traffic cameras bit.ly/2nb0vJ2. Some of these may not work. Please, make sure that you load only the cameras you need to ensure that the page remains functional for everyone.
Electricity consumption by end uses in residential/private housing segments in Hong Kong (2005-2015) bit.ly/2DCluQ1. Uses sheet 13 from this Excel file bit.ly/2DDPnQ9. From sheet 1, we can create this figure bit.ly/2ncKRNw, showing how energy end use per capita has slightly decreased over the period, which is in contrast with the demands at many other places in the world.
Fountains in Paris by type bit.ly/2DDO43M
A map of the buildings at the University of Southampton bit.ly/2nc4Dsl. Once you see something like this, you qucikly realize that universities with more than ten buildings perhaps need to have one too.
One thing I find disturbing on some websites are the default counters which wait for my action to start spinning at high-speed.
Having plants transmit Wi-Fi signal from their leaves? Not sure when this might happen. But an article on solar windows (in IEEE Spectrum) shows that some installations are already happening.
Document entries about land units sold in the most popular UK locations (since 01.01.1995) bit.ly/2DzTmNA. I used the term "document entries" here, because due to four errors in the dataset, I was not able to properly include the information about the additions, changes or deletions that would give a more accurate number how many units were sold. Using the same data, we can see which years these entries refer to bit.ly/2DBRiVx. The period 1997-2007 seems to have been the most intensive regarding land sales. More recent years like 2017 reach only 62% of the peak values achieved in 2002. You can also see how the prices paid have varied in many of the UK cities over time bit.ly/2DEijHF and what the median prices were bit.ly/2DA6ySw (preserving the original order). As you can see, some cities registered less transactions, but the median price paid there was higher.
Road network length per unit area in Denmark's provinces bit.ly/2n8FGOn. According to the data, Københavns omegn is the second-smallest province, but has a comparatively long network of roads.
Someone animated a transformation of a doughnut into a cup bit.ly/2n7vI01
Net price index in Denmark (1980-2017) bit.ly/2DE5jle
Incidents by hour of the day in Minneapolis, 2017 bit.ly/2n4Ldpj. The data has been binned twice: An incident that occured, for instance at 15:18 was added to the bin 15:00. Then it was noticeable that most incidents happened after 17:00, but there seemed to be a small difference in the hours before and after 20:00. The total number of incidents between 17:00 and 20:00 was 8% lower than in the time between 20:00 and 00:00, which suggests that late hours are more incident-rich. You can also see the locations of the incidents, colored by type bit.ly/2DAYd1e. There seems to be a long street, a large and a small spot, all having above average incident concentrations.
The property taxes of 114283 buildings in Durham for 2017 are known (see Durham open data site), which gives us the chance to see how strong the relationship between total asset value and tax bill is. The correlation coefficient came at 0.66295, which is fairly positive. At the same time the median tax bill was 1.3464% of the total asset value.
On "owning your content" bit.ly/2Dxo2Pq, via @swissmiss
My attempt to initialize a relatively large vector of tuples or structs in C++ didn't work. This caused close to 100% CPU usage for quite some time, while memory stayed at ≈55%. Not sure what the reason behind this was; reducing the tuples to a much smaller number worked. An old C array of strings (2D of size 47000 x 4items) also didn't work, which was slightly disappointing and forced me to temporarily switch to Python. Do you have an idea what I am missing in this case?
Saw very interesting graphs on the divergence between corporate profits and wages, which makes me even more reluctant to work first and think second. Possibly explains the motivation behind the jobs page as well.
Had the idea of computing betweenness centrality of New York's landmarks (pandas), but the number of combinations of more than 47000 items (itertools) together with storing the heap of the distances between them (heapq) with the goal of inserting edges only between the closest nodes (networkx) was still prohibitively expensive on my machine. Update: Made some small progress, though not to the extent I wished. Used random sampling to pick 2000 landmarks at random, constructed a graph and then computed the betweenness centrality in this case. To my surprise, most nodes had a value of zero, with only a single one having more than 0.99. By obtaining its id, I saw which latitude, longitude and address corresponded to it (40.665555, -73.974954, "95 Prospect Park West"). Then, viewing this location on a map revealed that it is almost at the middle of a very long street that is passing near a big park in Brooklyn. Even only with 2000 landmarks, the computation still took some time. Yet, using all landmarks would have been much more interesting... We can also do something else: find the landmark whose sum of distances to all other landmarks is minimum. This gives us the concrete address "464 Grand Street" at (40.715430, -73.983718), which is near the Williamsburg Bridge. (The next two locations are the numbers 513 and 511 on the same street.) This means that someone living nearby would be closest to a maximal number of landmarks, at least on a straight line. Finding places that are central in some sense has applications in store/facility location, investment decisions, customer acquisition and other areas.
Had intention to move this idea bit.ly/2DwLXi4 forward, but realized that dealing with interfaces is perhaps not the best use of my time (see below).
It's really hard to return to defining variables by preceding them by a dollar sign (PHP) once you have worked with Python. Shift + 4 is an awkward key combination just to define or refer to a variable. Additionally, if you still remember what I said about code bumps, it is fully applicable here as well. The more often we have to use such key combinations, the more tiring it becomes. Then the question arises whether we could have used our time better elsewhere. The speed of testing user interfaces is another critical point that can make writing code feel unnecessary slow. Especially when we consider that today's software has become so complex that using only a couple of input fields is no longer sufficient to capture its complexity. Using a form filler to generate fake data at scale means that the programmer himself will have to track long sequences of nonsensical values while trying to decipher which of them relates to which field. And the more values there are, the more likely it is that at least one will be missed and the script will break. The alternative is to rely on autocomplete in the browser, while typing all values manually, which while providing a better context is even slower.
When working with/for other people, payment is the minimum viable thing that should excite me. If this condition evaluates to false, we may not even meet, let alone speak.
Like most previous years, 2018 will be again the year of the people. Not the year of the processors, the Spectres and Meltdowns, the Bitcoin mining rigs, the 600+ watt GPUs, the huge data centers and the companies who spend their last cents in infrastructure, while wondering why they can't find people. The era of free workers came to its end. Without people, these companies and their processors will increasingly get irrelevant. In fact, to utilize the available processors, someone will have to come and write the code for them first. "Free programmers" just doesn't make business sense, especially at scale.
Recently, I've read two different, independent studies on energy usage at homes and they both slightly surprised me with their findings that refrigerators tend to consume more energy on average than water heaters (I thought it was the other way around). So I decided to take another look, loading a dataset about refrigerators found on data.gov. It contained lab measured kWh/day and the volume (in cubic feet) of the tested models. Dividing both, I came to the following ranking bit.ly/2DrujMD. The only problem with this is that these models seem to be used in medical/scientific environments and are thus not very representative of what we find usually at homes. Clearly, more data will be needed.
Found an interesting diagram about the health benefits of physical activity bit.ly/2DqpnHU, which was present in a freely available report assessing the needs of Oxfordshire citizens. The report also contained numbers on demographic picture, prevalence of different illnesses (cancer, diabetes, stroke...), blindness, stats on obesity and more.
Street trees by condition in Cambridge, Massachusetts bit.ly/2mSJhQK. It may be hard to see on this map, but 561 trees (5.21%) are in a poor condition, while 158 trees (1.46%) are no longer alive. Honeylocust, red maple, Norway maple, pin oak and green ash are most common, but there are also 240 lilacs, 197 pagoda trees, 103 flowering cherries, 2 maples and 1 snowbell, all Japanese. Wondering whether there is a historical reason behind this influence.
I'd be more interested in seeing a router which uses a single antenna, still covering a wide perimeter rather than one having ten, however beautiful they might open up. I go from the assumption that there must be some cost to operate that many, but I might be wrong. It would be nice to see the antenna transparently embedded into the device rather than drawing attention. A separate antenna somehow suggests instability to me. What if I carelessly dropped the device? Would this stretched piece then break?
Noticed that one of the demos—showing the screenshots from the landrover on Mars—is no longer working on this server. Not knowing the exact reason, since it used to work. Locally, I am still able to see the photos, but as before it takes some time.
If the cost of signing in exceeds the potential gain from the use of the software, expect people to be unwilling to waste their time.
Application: "rent vs. buy calculator" bit.ly/2mOdroc to decide which is one is better. Not sure why this is the first time I see something like this. You can use a similar computation to understand whether to be available full-time or only part-time to your employer.
"Urban maths: The Betz you can do?" bit.ly/2mLSrOU shows some interesting math related to the energy generation by a wind turbine. A very well written and informative article.
Abandoned properties can present a series problem for a city's landscape.
Parking place utilization at different lots at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) bit.ly/2mNVF4t
Tracking NBA game points over time bit.ly/2DoNAOY
Finding nearby Michelin restaurants in the UK and Ireland (18.01.2018) bit.ly/2mHABwv. Still interested in seeing some answers to my question in the last bit though.
Tried to list potential interests people could have. Can you identify something important that is missing? bit.ly/2DlYkNO. The checkboxes didn't fit on a single screen, so I hope you don't mind that I downscaled them a bit.
Relying on external services to deliver your content could make error messages like "Connection timed out" more frequent or prevent people from being able to access your "award-winning" (because in that particular case it was) portfolio. When this happens, the site should strive to remain silent rather than reveal the entire chain of service providers and which link between them was broken. Visitors rarely want to be bothered with such details. Only you can decide how often you'd like people to see this information. Reminds me of the article "Dependencies rule our lives", which still seems true today.
When the dimensions of web page elements are big and new ones are appearing on scroll, animated from the bottom-up, users may temporarily experience half of their screen filled before the other half joins it. This is unacceptable. Striving to update only a minimal area (see my post "Screen space waste") or (even better) avoiding animation for content (if possible) could lead to a better result.
Triangles following a spiral path bit.ly/2DgYuGg
Learning the names of Michigan-based animals from their descriptions bit.ly/2B4DCfq
"Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries, dies" nyti.ms/2DdwnYp. I had a short period when "The Cranberries" was one of my favourite bands. So saddened to read this. But her songs will continue to ring in my head. If you also feel bad, here is "Stars" bit.ly/2B37CZ0
A, B and C grades from restaurant inspections in Las Vegas bit.ly/2Dcose5. Many locations had positive longitude instead of negative, but this was easy to fix.
Real-time locations of some public vehicles in Phoenix bit.ly/2DdSk9T. It would have been nice to also draw the paths of the vehicles, but this was not given. Sometimes, vehicles that appear close together may serve the same route.
Map of incident frequency in Tucson ("last 45 days") bit.ly/2B3qAim. The north-west part of the city shows a slightly higher concentration of incidents.
Looking at a graphic by the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, where they claim that until June 2017, 71953 solar projects contributed to 1699MW of installed power bit.ly/2DfUDck
Please, try to understand that repositories aren't hangars where you dump content, without spending a second to think how it will be accessed later. The more metadata and the better descriptions you provide, the better. Think about whether your visitors would be able to tell quickly what the data is about. This is valid for anything we put online. Because being descriptive matters.
Monthly unemployment claims by industry in Missouri (07.2011 - 12.2017, log scale) bit.ly/2B34cp3. Considering the number of claims, we can see that the sectors of utilities and mining seem to have the lowest unemployment. Source: bit.ly/2DbwGTL.
Michigan vehicle production by month (04.1992 - 09.2017) bit.ly/2DbpwPn
Unemployment rate by state in USA bit.ly/2B0CzgB as long as the published data is correct. Surprised to see New York so far behind.
Single screen with the most common customer service request descriptions in Cincinatti bit.ly/2DbIGEL. Metal furniture seems to be a big problem, but also a lot of requests were connected with trash and buildings in one or another form.
Places to recycle waste in Hong Kong bit.ly/2DcpTt2. Keeping the environment clean is every citizen's duty. Hong Kong shows how many places can be involved in waste collection to minimize pollution and to guarantee that the next generations will also find the city livable.
When looking at the number of cancer cases as reported by the Maryland Cancer Registry, one could only wonder why the big difference. The number of cases in men were 2.008 times higher than those in women, which doesn't appear "by chance" to me. Could it be that one of the groups knows something that the other doesn't?
Vehicle crashes in Maryland (Q1 2015 - Q3 2017) bit.ly/2Db8XTL. Over 311 thousand in less than three years seems a lot. For instance, the intersection Capital Beltway - Connecticut Ave appears in 581 crash cases. Looking for a way to reduce the total number of crashes could help many people.
Investing in some projects brought the highest returns on invested dollar for MEA, Maryland bit.ly/2D94Ib2. Hagerstown Light Department seems to have been a good choice for a grant.
Maryland's electricity generation by source as percentage of the total (1990 - 2015, log scale) bit.ly/2Dd3prF. In 2015, for the first time nuclear has surpassed coal as percent of the total electricity generated. Petroleum declined fast since 2005, hydroelectric remained relatively constant, natural gas increased slightly in more recent years, while solar has grown slightly faster than wind.
Maryland homes, partially financed by MEA's Home Performance Rebate Program to increase energy efficiency bit.ly/2AY9Jxd. Had to remove two points, whose coordinates seemed off. The concentration of the points looks interesting as if two clusters exist, where most homes were located.
Projects in Maryland, partially financed with grants from the Clean Energy Awards Program bit.ly/2D8IbLA. Bigger points indicate higher awards. The grants were given for solar, geothermal and wind installations. So nice to see the scale at which some states are implementing renewable energy.
The Maryland Open Data portal gives a fairly interesting view on the GDP per capita in various US states bit.ly/2D8GOfT
Finding the position of a book on a bookshelf bit.ly/2AYiW8N
According to the World Energy Council, Europe had the most installed solar capacity by 2016, with Germany being the leader bit.ly/2AUHQ9f. The country has shut down many nuclear power plants and reached the milestone of having over 85% of its energy come from renewable sources. This is something other European countries can only dream about. That the amount of sunshine in Germany is said to be similar to the one in Alaska leaves us wondering how under suboptimal conditions so much electricity can be produced.
The "let" keyword in programming for some reason reminds me of the label "Open here". It tries to tell about something that should simply be there. I saw Rust code using it, which once again reminded me about its existence in JavaScript. But I rarely use it.
A couple of lines to compare surface heat flux across three elements in a circuit bit.ly/2AVolgU
Sensor data from Aarhus, Denmark bit.ly/2D4LIum (environmental). Hoperfully, this will get updated soon. There is also real-time traffic data bit.ly/2D5hiZ0, but the vehicle coordinates are unknown. The parking place utilization page also looks nice bit.ly/2D7bzC7.
3-4 days later my small brain still has trouble accepting the idea that UV light could potentially be used to purify water and air. Internally: "Is this true? Could it be? I saw a company claiming to be able to do it!" Oh, no.
Two things that can be explained by SVG polygons over images and hover functionality: elements of a biological cell and elements of an electronic circuit. So far I have seen such polygons over maps only. Room for improvement.
If a company is willing to hire programmers, it can assume that they will "compute" the job offer—dividing the announced salary by the number of required technologies. That number directly correlates with effort, where many nights outside work will have to be spent to acquire these skills. A highly paying job requiring knowledge of over 20 technologies with "interest" in 5 more might still not be that interesting relative to a slightly lower paying job where only 4-5 technolgies are listed with a clear perspective on how they will be used. When we consider that 4-5 technologies is perhaps a reasonable upper bound someone would be able to master, then the decision becomes clear. The first offer signals "we study every fancy new thing that appears", while the second says "we work focused and hard, but we also appreciate our personal life". Could you guess which offer would be more interesting to an applicant?
Once you see how syntax highlighting is done under the hood bit.ly/2ASr7TW, you'll try to do everything to avoid it.
"Shading is often the most expensive computation in a GPU pipeline" This sentence is enough to make one think about the cost of painting in most websites. Creating placeholders first (wireframe) and filling them later might be seen as slightly faster, but it is hard to become comfortable with the idea of doing things twice.
A nice map of the streets in Cologne where construction is taking place bit.ly/2D30B0m ↗
Whenever I see a carefully crafted recipe on a website, I think about how beautiful web design could be. The author provided a pleasing photo, listed all ingredients without stressing the reader to follow exact quantities, using phrases like "more or less" and "as you wish" to smoothly arrive at a very short, succinct description of the recipe that takes less than 10mins to follow. This person, whether they know it or not, is a web designer. If someone, who never intended to follow through the recipe, saw the simplicity it has been reduced to, and chose to do so, then the author has achieved its goal—to provide a new, different experience.
It would have been nice if an SVG path element had the notion of betweenness centrality.
The story of the 80-year old German patient who needed an operation, but turned away his head when the doctor came and his wife going the extra mile to ask in the doctor's absence whether he was a true one is particularly striking for me. It shows how far discrimination (due to race) can go. This happens in the middle of Europe, in a country which claims to be open to differences and feels proud of its integration efforts, where many people would claim that they don't discriminate, but then attempt to hire foreigners at below minimal market rates. Interestingly, the doctor accepted such a treatment, but a person having a greater degree of self-respect would have certainly refused to serve the patient, no matter that he is a German.
Ten content-rich slides labeled "slicing web design" bit.ly/2AQu3AF ↗
Saw a fairly creative drawing shown in a 45° perspective, where a monitor has been subdivided into areas that looked a lot like drawers, one drawer being opened outside the monitor, into the real space, full of documents inside. A miniaturized human being was looking to it from below. Big data.
Superfoods, supercapacitors, superconductivity... looks like a trend to me.
A quick overview of Munich's climate parameters bit.ly/2ALPLWw
"Graphical models should allow unexpected values to present themselves" (John Tukey's idea). This is also an effect I seek in my own visualizations, to ensure no preconceived notion towards the visible and the latent. Before posting anything online, I often prepare multiple visualizations
Some people believe that programming is like taking a cookbook and applying a recipe or simply pasting a snippet into the code they are working on. Work needs to be much better than that.
Montreal traffic cameras bit.ly/2CWqLSf expands on the existing series. The streets seem to have a good amount of snow today. Here: not a single snowflake.
Location of most litter bins in the center of Dublin, Ireland bit.ly/2CQQVWx. If you notice that the orientation of the map isn't accurate, please let me know. The City Council wants to reduce their count and replace them with smart bins, which can monitor their fill level and alert when they should be emptied while at the same time using solar energy to compact the litter and delay this event. Given that in Europe many litter bins are frequently overflowing, this might set a good example.
Imagine that you hold a multimeter in your hands. If the device is bulky, looks ugly or the buttons don't work the way you expect, how often are you going to use it? The same is valid for websites. Spending time on designing the interface right from the start is usually time well spent. Saying this, because I still see devices appearing before their interface has been polished.
The solar potential dataset bit.ly/2CQyGR7 is interesting, because it classifies locations for solar panel roof installations as "excellent suitable", "well suitable" or just "suitable". Since there were five features (insolation, unshaded roof area, PV generation, PV emission savings and PV system size), I wondered how this decision is actually made, so I computed the feature importances as seen here bit.ly/2ADsDtb and found that insolation came first by a wide margin (0.87 vs. 0.032 for the second most important feature). After this I ranked all locations by insolation and discovered that the threshold value separating "well suitable" from "excellent suitable" was exactly 1000kWh/m² per year. Sharing this because it might help someone. The top location in Bristol had insolation of 1142.3kWh/m² per year.
Looking at a dataset about Bristol buildings energy consumption bit.ly/2ADMXdS by Open Data Bristol led me to discover the Avonmouth wind turbines bit.ly/2CSA9Gv by Thrive Renewables, whose average annual production covers the requirements of the biggest 38 energy consumers in the city. Not a small achievement, given that only four turbines were used.
Nice to hear that integrating a water sensor in an umbrella can make it light up when it rains. I guess, this can be especially useful at night when you can't see easily whether you are stepping on a dry surface or in a puddle. Now thinking of lights having a surface that acts both as a solar cell and rain detector.
IEEE Spectrum mentioned that most of the new streetlights in San Diego will be available in March 2018. They will come with many integrated sensors (temperature, humidity, vibration, magnetic field, vision and acoustics), will be dimmable (to reduce consumption), and will detect crashes by the sound they produce, while at the same time being able to self-evaluate the gathered data and send the result to a centralized place, possibly where it can be monitored bit.ly/2ACa60l. We can expect the upcoming dataset to be quite interesting. Update: Reading something else, now I see that a gas sensor sensor might also be nice to have.
All-in-one devices may work well; all-in-one classes or functions are rarely bearable.
Geometry is also important at home, not just in demos. Placing the router high, at a central place and with no nearby plants/obstacles is said to improve connectivity, since the distances to most devices would then be shorter. In my case I can't easily change that location and it's relatively far from me, but somehow link quality still comes at 70%. If I chose another OS (as I did before), this number would have been 40-50%. The next time I observe such a weak connectivity, I will have to check whether Homedale can help bit.ly/2CMacZl. Seeking ways to improve the network is also motivated by its speed relative to other components (from slowest to fastest): network -> hard disk -> RAM -> CPU. If the average page takes 10s to load and you visited 40 today, you've lost &approx.6.66mins of your time without being able to even check the content. That's enough time for lots of CPU cycles.
Profiling Spiegel didn't end well. Content loaded fully after 75 seconds with high CPU utilization and plenty of long frames bit.ly/2Av98mG. The site made 391 HTTP requests (lots of third-party content) for a total weight of 4MB. Rendered plenty of large images which certainly contributed to the non-smooth scrolling. I'll stop here.
Failure rates are said to grow almost linearly with system size. This means that there is a theoretical limit of the amount of work most organizations can handle, even when they aim for more. Going beyond this limit means risking more failures and making more customers unhappy.
Design with no requirements is mostly wrong, except in the rare cases when the designer can prove they know what the client dreamed about last night without being able to remember it.
What's the benefit releative to the cost of writing this software? Because when on the negative side, no company should hope to keep its workers. I could very well understand if they chose to become unavailable. One could think of this as a kind of metaprogramming.
According to Fortune 500, the last year Apple was ≈3.35 times more profitable than Walmart and almost twice as profitable as the second company on the list - J.P. Morgan Chase. This is quite a difference.
Good to see real-time fishing activity bit.ly/2AqCjao ↗
An interesting article on using deep learning for cucumber sorting bit.ly/2ArafU4 ↗
Are there actions that "push" the page multiple times after it has been rendered? Reflow and repaint can be seen as sources of inefficiency when it becomes obvious that they are used for eye candy rather than a meaningful purpose.
A big-screen TV is much more than its screen, but we tend to forget that when we see that it takes a large percentage of the device area. We may not perceive this device as a system of components, because they remain skillfully hidden, accessible only through the remote control, which is acting as an interface. Yet, neglect in the quality in any of these components could introduce artefacts or noise in the picture. This means that how the picture appears is an effect, while the viewer who is living in an imaginary world believes that they are looking at the cause. Great design attempts to hide complexity (see Apple devices for instance) and this is also frequently the case with great software.
Do you use the smallest number of variables that could possibly work for the task you want to tackle? Do you overwrite variables in some cases or do you always prefer to introduce new ones to avoid the possibility of conflict?
Did you like PHP's double questionmark operator (??) ? Example: $val = isset($_POST['field_name']) ? $_POST['field_name'] : null; becomes $val = $_POST['field_name'] ?? null;. This has the potential to greatly simplify some existing pieces of code. Reminds me of JS or-chains (var val = a || b || c || d;), where if c is true, d would never evaluate. If you wanted to learn more, one way would be to start working with me, for instance.
Back and still thinking how I might end. The new year doesn't start well for me, but at least my hope is that it could slowly develop into something more positive. I hope that this event would prompt me to work and serve more as opposed to work most of the time on things I find interesting, as in previous years. Yet, at the same time it shows that noone lives forever and to experience life fully, one's work has to be appreciated even when being far from perfect.
Due to a sad reason I won't be able to reply to any emails in the next few days. I hope you'll understand.
Saw a photo of a solar-powered stadium in Brazil that is said to be self-sufficient. Not only that, but it manages to power 2200 households in the neighborhood. This is not five or ten.
Locations with acquired (or in the process of acquiring) solar permits in San Diego between 01.01.2017 and 22.12.2017 bit.ly/2zXA8el. According to the data, the average time from application to obtaining a permit is just 6.395 days, which seems suspiciously fast (maybe a mistake?). Interestingly, three people obtained the most permits, with the third person acquiring 11 times more permits than the next on the list. In 1381 cases (out of 6178) the project owners described scopes indicating a target wattage, which allows us to compute a planned capacity of ≈6.3945 gigawatts. Since this number doesn't describe all projects, but only ≈22% of them, it is not perfect, but at least it enables us to gauge the dimension at which solar generated electricity could be expanding in this city.
An attempt to understand the nature of crime in London bit.ly/2ClD4ap
Street lights in Sacramento and their total wattage bit.ly/2zYKyKy
According to my code, the year-to-date earnigs from the San Diego parking system exceeded 6.5 million dollar bit.ly/2CnzeO4
Average price of electricity to ultimate customers, broken down by type of use (residential, commercial, industrial) and by US state in October 2016 and October 2017 bit.ly/2zX4w8D
Comparing fluctuations in the dollar prices of a ton of coal and a barrel of petroleum liquid between January 2015 and October 2017 in USA bit.ly/2Cl13Xn. Petrol seem to have reached its lowest price in March 2016, but its price varied a lot. Relative to that, coal price remains relatively stable, although it seems to slightly decline over time.
Electricity generation from wind and solar by US state in the last two years bit.ly/2CjQ3cJ. California and Texas seem to switch places.
Traffic counts on various streets in San Diego bit.ly/2Cii8kH. Each street has been color coded, although the whole looks like a mixture of confetti, which is not very useful. To find the streets with the most traffic bit.ly/2CjxvJS, I used a somewhat unconventional approach: taking the median of all measures for a given street regardless of the time they were made to ensure that each pair of streets appears exactly once, then splitting that pair to get the names of all inndividual streets and summing the median values across all occurences of each street. The result is a weight that isn't very meaningful by itself, but once these weights are sorted, busy streets can be found to have higher values relative to others. Since each street participates in various street intersections, this practically considers them all.
Net electricity generation by energy source and net generation from renewable sources in USA (2007 - 2016) bit.ly/2CibzPh. This paints a picture that the amount of energy produced by hydroelectric and nuclear has remained relatively constant. That produced by coal is declining rapidly (which is good) and the energy produced by natural gas has not only increased but now surpasses that of coal. Renewable sources excluding hydroelectric and solar are also on the rise. In the total energy generation of all types of sources, solar is still hardly noticeable. But if we observe only renewable sources, generation from solar, although at the bottom of the diagram, is increasing noticeably. But this still cannot be compared with the remarkable growth of wind electricity generation. Hydroelectric electricity generation seems somewhat inconsistent, because in some years it increased rapidly, but then decreased to previous levels.
Happy New Year 2018! Frohes Neues Jahr! Happy, healthy and smiling! :)
Do you remember that I compared the electricity usage in Boston's City Hall and the Central Library some time ago? bit.ly/2rZOnzD As you can see, the last day on the graphic is 06.06.2017. Now it looks like the data team behind this doesn't even know what rest is, since even on New Year they worked to update the dateset (yes, the last observation is from today, 12:30). To avoid lagging behind them, I updated my graphic correspondingly bit.ly/2Chvv4G. City Hall seems to prepare for something in December.
Didn't know that windows could eventually act as solar panels one day, given the technology that NREL demonstrated go.nature.com/2zV3868. If that's possible and so many buildings already have windows (some of which are large), perhaps only their coatings could be changed. Seems a lighter touch to me than extending the roof areas to be able to accomodate more panels, using plenty of additional material. Currently, this technology is in an early stage and not very efficient (slightly above 11% versus slightly above 21% for LG solar panels), but it is nice to see it developing.
I like the municipal energy report of the city of Providence, where almost all city-owned buildings were evaluated for energy-efficiency. Specifically, here is how the page describing the performance of the elementary schools looks like bit.ly/2zTnk8D. Always nice to see the level of detail in such efforts. Providence City Hall reached an Energy Star score of 96 in 2016, reducing its costs by $240000 since 2012.
Nose levels at various locations in Dublin bit.ly/2zSN6cU. If you notice that the page no longer works, write me and I'll try to fix it if possible. Today is Sunday before New Year, so we can track now how loud this night is going to be. The last night was already loud at Bull Island, especially in the hours from 00:30 to 06:10, which you can easily see. While most places seemed to have noise levels around 46-50dB(A), Chancery Park was consistently louder than average (with peak that reached 68.07dB(A) this morning at 09:45).
"Junk food: Why people can't control themselves and what to do about it" bit.ly/2CewX83. Discovered RAND and now can't stop reading on it. Other things I learned: stickers/labels on foods like "high in sugar", "high in salt" etc. helped to reduce obesity in Chile. Poor sleep is said to be linked with seven of the leading causes of death in the US; drivers who slept only 4-5 hours had 5x the crash rate of those who slept 7 hours. The cost of antimicrobial resistance is estimated to become 11-444 million by 2050 (depending on scenario), with each new drug taking a lot of time to develop, but eventually becoming ineffective due to the microbes becoming resistent to it or mutating into other forms. The estimated true cost of corruption in Europe is said to be 990 billion annually, or 8x higher than initially anticipated. Interesting numbers.
Shenzhen electrified all its busses, which sets such a great example for the rest of the world.
Does the design feel as part of the object to the point that it is not even noticeable?
BAföG expenditures over time and average expenditure per person for all German states bit.ly/2CfAqTu. The increase in BAföG aid has been strongest in Nordrhein-Westfalen and Bayern and weakest in Saarland. All German states seem to have raised their average monthly assistance per person between 1991 and 2016. At the beginning, the aid was slightly less than 300€ in more recent years it climbed to ≈450€.
Enterprise births and deaths by sector in Germany, 2015 (sorted by total number of enterprises) bit.ly/2zQqaLz. We see that sectors having less companies tend to have positive net company establishments, while some sectors, already having many companies are showing negative net company formation. Interestingly, the scientific sector (5th place out of 79) was on the negative side in 2015, while information and communication was relatively neural. But the latter is currently on place 20 in terms of total number of operating companies, which doesn't place it among the most important for the German economy. The sector of human health activities is interesting, because it is highly ranked, but remained neutral while creating only few new companies. Perhaps the barriers to entry there are too high. The industry and service sector lost more than 250000 companies this year, which is a very high number. In case you are interested, the dataset is available on the European data portal bit.ly/2zPIdkT.
Track length of the rail network in Germany at the end of 2015 bit.ly/2zQ6ozD
Historic demographics by sex in Germany bit.ly/2zOaTe5. The obvious question now is what happened between March and June 2011. Perhaps there is some reason or the measurement methodology was changed.
Average milk yield per cow by state in Germany (2000-2016) bit.ly/2zPdZhV. Expected to see Mecklenburg-Vorpommern at the first place, but milk production in Thüringen and Berlin looks even better. However, we should be aware of the price we pay for that production and whether it is sustainable. If the number of cows is shrinking and that of people demanding milk is growing, this raises the demands on the existing cows, which may force producers to feed them with stimulants to both satisfy the market and increase their profits. The end consumer will then be served with milk of lower quality, produced under unscrupulous conditions. As a parallel, we could think of employers acting similarly to milk their employees every single day until not much is left of them. The other dark side of milk production is seeing producers spill their milk on the streets in response to the low purchase prices that buyers were willing to pay. Then a long chain of milk sellers and resellers turns into play (making more money than the producers themselves), increasing the end prices (sometimes multiple times) for the end consumer.
2017 was also the year in which I learned to write less JavaScript. In my opinion, the language developed in the wrong direction, which I can no longer support or want to be part of. There is now reliance on promises, async/await, for...of loops, destructuring, arrow functions and much more. Some of these are nice, but all introduced additional complexity. The minimum requirement for JS developers has shifted towards being proficient with things like Babel, yarn & npm, React, Vue, Angular, Backbone, perhaps JQuery, other project-specific libraries dealing with SVG, gradients, scrolls, tap delays on mobile, animations etc., finishing with WebAssembly as culmination. Clearly, JavaScript has become a language in which young people are forced to burn out, which in my opinion isn't sustainable. Being produced only in a short time, this complexity would be hard to handle even in the next five years. There are certain characteristics in a language that I expect it to have before committing to spending years in learning and using it. Currently these characteristics are slowly disappearing in JavaScript, so my plan is to stick to my knowledge up to v1.5, which has most of the things I need and nothing more. I also didn't like the more recent uses of the language (which is a very important aspect), integrating it in places it was never available before. Once I saw the developments, I switched my focus to C++ and although it also took me quite some time to adjust to it, starting from null, I found that this time was well spent. I looked inside interesting projects and learned about project structure and more complex object interaction patterns. I found the language very expressive, which you might be able to observe in some of my attempts to use it. I also liked the elegance of C# before, but at one point or another I had trouble even compiling the simplest code, while one of the IDEs kept crashing for no obvious reason. I never found enough content on Java to keep me interested for long, which is unfortunate. As always, Python continues to excite me, but I frequently find that in my context it is not sufficiently fast for what I need (which became obvious with a neural network). For instance, whenever I want to filter high-dimensional data like an image, I have to make many small adjustments and run the computation each time to observe what changed and determine whether this was my intended result. The effect is that I can easily spend half a day (for computational, not creative reasons) on code that wasn't achieving much. Sometimes Python feels like combining mosaics to me or the learning how to make the best use of what is already available. Although there are some definitions that creativity is combinatory play, it didn't feel this way to me, where focusing too much on the individual components frequently caused me to miss important aspects on the big picture and the end goal. I also felt that the language is hiding too much, not knowing at any point in time what is truly happening or why in a certain way. When an internal error appeared in an external library due to some assumption about the type of an input parameter, it was mostly too late for corrections and the entire screen was filled with a long stack trace. Many people use Python mainly for scientific purposes or data analysis. I also use it to design for the web, where it helps to do the job in a fast and efficient way. Unfortunately, I cannot control which Python to have installed, so I am still stuck to v2.6.6, which is quite limited. External libraries like numpy, scipy, matplotlib and others are simply unavailabe, so I can only run the code locally, paste it on a page and show a graphic that it produced, but not execute it in real time in the way I wished. Having latest Python on a cheap custom device means that I would be unable to have the same reliability should something go wrong—reason enough to shy away from this option. More recently I started refreshing my PHP, since it is the only language working unconditionally in my hosting environment. But as always, we shouldn't blindly speak about the languages, but what they enable us to achieve. This could be anything important: an ecommerce site for selling products at scale; seeking insights from existing data to improve business operations or evaluate investment decisions; controlling devices; using AI to learn from the vast pool of information or to drive vehicles; reduction of inefficient car maneuvers; providing public APIs to enable more interesting applications; data collection via sensors (IoT) to improve understanding on issues related to the environment or to observe air and water quality or smart cities and homes; speech recognition; onlne communication; reservation systems for hotels, restaurants, events or even dentist hours; soil composition analysis to understand the observed agricultural efficiency; microbiome analysis to understand the complex networks of bacteria in our bodies; seeking patterns in protein-protein interactions in a graph; applications in the context of renewable energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal etc.); network packet analysis for intrusion detection; real-time maps of critical resource usage or emissions; vehicle sharing; LIDAR distance estimation; mathematical modeling of processes and function optimization; advertisement attributes optimization; golf stick, tennis racquet, racer bike, car, airplane design optimization; interior design mood analysis; material property analysis, improvement and development of enhanced materials (Kevlar) or item weight reduction by preserving durability; nanotechnology and automation; HPC system design; code introspection and analysis; optimizing available product quantities according to muri, mura and muda (e.g. in warehouses); reducing power consumption for better device battery life; solar panel relative-to-sun angle auto-adjustment; photographic sensors working similar to the eye; self-healing and self-optimization (like turning off unused parts/areas once noticed); monitoring dashboards; seeking multiple-purposes for each thing produced; few-part devices; understanding how people learn and the brain's function; developing micro-awareness for animal behavior (goats are claimed to be useful as early detectors of volcano activity) as well as systems for early warning; disease understanding and healing; analysis of natural phenomena like hurricanes, but also wind and water streams, ocean levels; shipping cost and delivery time reduction; route optimization; sound absorption and cancellation; signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement; geometric design and optimization of physical dimensions; building insulation; regression (for prediction), clustering and classification; before-after comparisons; reduction of line intersections (in tube/road network design); automated lighting at music events; reactive and robotic toys; habit and progress analysis; prioritization according to the probability and severity of events; tumor detection in medical images; risk estimation and reduction; real-time price optimization based on supply and demand; automated auction participation; clickstream analysis and others. The language is rarely more important than the cause.
Another thing to remember this year would be the return of paywalls, especially in online magazines and newspapers. What this could lead to is a restricted, limited-access, monopolized, advertisement-based web, being of less and less use to the average person. It doesn't help much if the only free resources someone can find date back from the year 1984 or when a single paper costs as much as an entire new book. Although the drive towards content monetization is understandable, publishing only short fragments in the way it is accepted today leads to nothing more than readers with fragmented attention. There will always be more fragments to concentrate on, just not enough context / substance to fully comprehend what they mean. The advertisers are actively using this, since the more disoriented / helpless you feel, the more easily they can serve their ends.
Programmers, who get used to reading only bite-sized snippets of code, having trouble when they encounter a more verbose language or developing a fragmented way of thinking, being unable to comprehend a sequence of long, complex sentences, choose to become easy to manipulate by the people who spend the time to read in full.
A framework isn't a product, so if you choose to develop one, how would you justify your effort/time spent? If you seek popularity instead of monetization, given the extensive palette of existing frameworks, you are unlikely to achieve it. And if you learn from other frameworks before creating your own, you will adopt the same low quality of work. Always create products that sell, serving concrete customer needs, not frameworks serving might haves.
Once again evaluated other payment platforms to see that most of them still don't support all countries. I don't consider Bitcoin as a payment alternative despite it's growth this year, because for some reason I tend to associate it with criminal activity (and you should too). But it gives employers more means to "optimize" their workforce salaries, enabling them to pay employees with "thin air" instead, which is arguably a dream come true. (A company in Japan switched to paying in Bitcoin, so eventually more will express the same desire). My initial hope was that GoCardless could change something by enabling the same payment options across Europe the way that PayPal has provided them elsewhere. Unfortunately, GoCardless seems to have reduced the list of supported countries. Also tested Due, which despite the beautiful interface, claimed that direct payments are "US only", although it mentioned few selected countries. Stripe too, lists only 25 supported countries. Two other previously independent companies like BrainTree and (I forgot its name) were acquired by PayPal, further monopolizing the way online payments are made. Ecwid is also a nice alternative, although I always find it bad when someone makes assumptions on my side in which currency I want to sell my products (even when this might require only setting an option). At the same time, some international payment gateways have started to publish the full costs of using their solutions to the point that it now becomes obvious that they are unaffordable for the large majority of small businesses in Europe or elsewhere. This is how, once again, we come to the end of 2017, not having a payment method that works universally across Europe. The same Europe, whose future seems so important in words, with people constantly speaking about integration, values and economic prosperity, while at the same time letting thoughts in the back, discrimination and unequal treatment play in full and eat at the roots of the original idea behind the union. Eventually, everything will come back to bite Brussels, so we'll see how much longer this will take. To sum up in one sentence: "In 2018 Europe still doesn't have a payment method." Fortunately, PayPal is always available, but the more I'll have to use it, the less open I'll become to working with other (non-paying) Europeans.
dummerAugust acceps PayPal as a payment method in case you wonder how you could pay for my services. However, I tend to select my clients carefully, so you cannot expect to be able to work with me by default if you don't truly understand the way I work or what I can deliver for you. This page and the blog have been made with the goal to clarify this and to let you know what you can expect after we start working together on a project. Notice that anything demonstrated here does not necessarily describe how I work with clients or what the full spectrum of my capabilities looks like. I never demonstrate them in context until I agree with the terms of the payment (which very likely won't happen at all). But a payment method is still available to those who deserve it. Not seeing anything wrong in saying it this way.
Had two simple ideas today: finding recipes matching a given list of ingredients and learning from the big Open Food Facts dataset. While working on the first, I noticed that the links the external service was providing were no longer accurate and the imagery was too small to be useful, which made my demo obsolete. Then I moved on to work on the second idea, but the dataset was malformed and I couldn't easily spot where. By attempting to do so, my machine crashed twice, so this idea was abandoned as well.
If you prefer using operators over function calls whenever possible, it is very likely that your code will be faster bit.ly/2zEvL7u. Calling the function here is almost 4.3 times slower than using an operator, at least on my machine. If you find that your functions can accept arrays as arguments, pass the arrays to a single function call rather than calling the same function repeatedly, each time with different arguments of length one.
Ratios of travel time in the peak period to travel time at free-flow for some cities in California, Texas and Florida between 1982 and 2014 plus relative increase in the ratio for most measured cities bit.ly/2zCL4h0 as seen in the data bit.ly/2BZSv88 by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. From the first diagram we see that over time the traffic in San Jose has slown down quite a bit, quickly approaching the same travel time index that San Francisco-Oakland had. San Diego and Sacramento have almost the same indices year-by-year as if they are connected in some way, which is quite interesting. If we look at the text after the third diagram, we see that traffic in Bridgeport-Stamford (never heard of it) has increased stronger than traffic in Las Vegas during the period, while traffic in San Juan has increased even more than that in San Jose.
This time it's not about ice, but ICE high-speed trains: an attempt to check for a relationship between speed and WiFi quality (in terms of badnwidth and latency) on some ICE trains bit.ly/2zDaCut using a 2.1GB dataset provided by Deutsche Bahn AG on 14.12.2017 bit.ly/2BYgIf3. The graphic gives the false impression that the receive rate is approx. twice as fast as the send rate, but the medians give another picture: speed of 20.3 m/s, receive rate of 589156 bytes/s (0.5618MB/s), send rate of 85016bytes/s (0.0810MB/s) and latency of 77.0ms. If we compare the medians, then the receive rate is almost 7 times faster than the send rate, but even then the speed of 560kB/s is slightly low for today's standards and demanding frequent travelers. As the diagram shows, in rare cases the latency can reach 12s, which is quite bad if it happens in 2017. Most requests seem to be initiated within 5s or not at all (if we look at the latency graphic, there seems to be an upper bound). Any latency over 100ms could introduce a noticeable delay, which directly affects people's willingness to browse. Interestingly, DB seems to use multiple on-train devices and Internet providers, so there might be switching times involved, which depending on the current conditions, can affect the overall WiFi speed and availability. Due to my hardware limitations, I cannot provide a more exhaustive analysis, but I am providing the link here so that anyone who wants it, can do it on their own. But one thing is sure: investment in faster Internet is rarely a one-time event, but an ongoing concern, which affects all travelers.
Still remembering the case when electricity was unavailable for hours at the Atlanta International Airport, when passengers couldn't travel further. That was the time when I learned that this was the biggest airport in USA, having more than 2500 flights scheduled on a daily basis. In my perception I always thought that the airport in New York must be the biggest, but it turned out that this perception was wrong. So I decided to explore more to see what else I don't know about US airports and also to gain some insight on the number of passengers served. What I could find was data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics about the state in 2013, so I visualized it bit.ly/2BZ5mY8. As you can see, the airport in Atlanta was by far the biggest one in 2013. Dallas Love Field also sounds nice and I see that they celebrated their 100th anniversary this year. The airport was built in 1917 and operates since then—such an inspiring durability. Perhaps there are even older airports I don't know about yet.
Wikipedia: "The U.S. state of Texas is divided into 254 counties, more than any other U.S. state." It's a relief to read about this after getting some numbers bit.ly/2BTyCPT. Few states at the bottom are missing, because I decided that the extra effort wasn't worth it (stitching together multiple screens). But you can assume that District of Columbia and Guam had only one county each, followed by Delaware and U.S. Virgin Islands with 3 counties each. A complete bar chart bit.ly/2zzqn5H. If we had the areas of each state, we could find out the states with the largest average county areas. But even so, it is interesting to see how fragmented some states are.
Average new car fuel consumption bit.ly/2BTTkzp
Finding the durations of flights bit.ly/2BSc5Dp
Results from a sample football league round (animated) bit.ly/2BPaA8X. The idea is generic enough as to be applicable to any competition where two sides are involved. Variations on the theme are also possible.
Separating concerns into n dishes means that should a single dish not be cooked perfectly or contain an overdose of red peppers, it is impossible to ruin the holiday. Merry Christmas, everyone!
Disheartened to hear how a bean stew in South Sudan costs the equivalent of spending 161 Euro in Berlin, according to the director of the World Food Program. There's so much hunger in this world.
Imagine that you shipped a product million times and suddenly realize that not everything in it is as perfect as you initially thought. Car makers frequently have this problem: malfunctioning brakes or airbags for instance can be the cause of human injuries or death. So they take the cars back from the market with the goal of fixing them. As you can imagine this operation is extremely costly and can easily bankrupt the company. By the time they encounter the problem, their car models might have reached very distant parts of the world, being very far from the factory where they were initially produced. How easy would be then to correct this mistake? As we know, the later a problem is detected, the more costly it becomes to fix it. So the severity and the probability of occurence of the problem are usually evaluated first to see whether such costs are justified. In some cases mistakes can be corrected by applying a software update. If I remember correctly from "The Toyota way", one element of the Toyota Production System (TPS) was the seeking of balance. In software and hardware too, almost anything is about making tradeoffs. One can integrate a very fast CPU in a mobile device while having the battery last only for a very short time or one can have a slow CPU with battery that lasts longer. But even then it's not that simple. While the CPU performance remains constant over time, battery performance doesn't—the battery wears out (sometimes quickly) over time. If it isn't replaced with a new one, the balance would shift away from the way the manufacturer originally imagined it. So what can one do in this case? You guessed it correctly, shipping a software update that adjust the CPU performance relative to the current battery (wear out) level. Is this meant in some way to make people upgrade their devices? I don't think so. It is meant to improve the longevity of the product, to allow it to be useful for a longer time and possibly to still have it working in a critical moment. Does the manufacturer need to inform users that their device has slown down a bit in response to the update, explaining the reasoning behind the tradeoffs? Maybe yes, maybe not. The manufacturer needs to ensure the quality of the product at any single time, nothing more, nothing less. Please, remember that many manufacturers don't even maintain their products once shipped, resulting in a track record of useless or unused devices. This has already made device pollution a severe problem in some countries. If a user didn't like the fact that someone intervened to improve their device, and tried to directly tell the manufacturer how the CPU frequency on their device should have been handled, then this sounds more as an attempt to tell the manufacturer how they should be doing their work. It is very unlikely that a client knows that better, otherwise they would have made the devices themselves. One thing that this could achieve is decreasing the rate of updates/innovation or directing them only towards newer, more shiny devices where not much is to be criticized at all. But this would do disservice to both sides, which is why I am mentioning the issue here after seeing how quick some people were to criticize some companies. It is often forgotten that the very first users of a device usually come from within the company where it is produced, so if they did something wrong, they would be hurting themselves first. Real people there spend a lot of time on programming, testing and quality assurance to ensure that the end client is always happy as well. But a company cannot do much if clients have a different, distorted opinion on what constitutes great quality. In that case it is probably better not to serve them (especially when they cannot be possibly satisfied), but to choose clients wisely. Clients that aren't open to discuss their issues calmly, but reach for the megaphone anytime they experience a small bug perhaps cost the company more than they bring. Which explains why everything mentioned above has also implications on the way I work as well.
The last sentence reminds me of two possible ways to add value: one is through creation while ensuring that another party is hurt during the production process (which is surprisingly common like in a zero-sum game) and another is through creation that introduces something innovative that builds and expands on top of what already exists without necessarily seeking creative destruction, without thoughts on competitior crushing or assertiveness with the goal of self-service. Unfortunately, I'm not seeing too many examples of the last.
Didn't know that ≈40% of Jakarta is now said to be under water, making the city "the fastest sinking city in the world" nyti.ms/2BFyQdj. This is such a tragedy. It only partially surprises me, because someone mentioned before that when ice is melting, distant regions from it are affected first (remembered this since it sounded so counterintuitive). So I had a blind spot for a while that made me uneasy: I've heard where ice was melting (Greenland), but was unaware of distant areas (like these in Asia for instance) which have felt or were affected by that. This New York Times article casts some light on that and at the same time underlines the dimensions of the problem. Perhaps Indonesia won't remain the only affected country. This also illustrates the "butterfly effect"—that whatever we do isn't just a local event or an isolated case, but something that always finds different incarnations or seeks to spread elsewhere, affecting seemingly unrelated people and things. But everything is interconnected. Whatever we do, whether we want it or not, is a form of setting an example—one that will be discussed, evaluated, eventually copied. My hope is that more of us can at least internally feel proud of what we do (always striving, never showing off), with a minimal negative impact on the happiness of others. Possibly a good wish for 2018.
As an European, I knew almost nothing about the geography of Bangladesh—a country whose population is said to be approximately twice that of Germany. I decided to fill my curiosity gap by making a small, tidy map of the locations and relative population sizes of some of the biggest cities in this country. This is the information I found, although I realize that it may not be the most accurate. Interesting topology and point sizes, given that the populations are on a log scale bit.ly/2BGNBNg. Dhaka has 2.65x more people than the second largest city and is located almost at the center of the country, which makes it easily accessible from anywhere.
Mind: "Use MinMaxScaler((from_voltage, to_voltage)).fit(voltages) to cause devices designed to work at different voltage ranges to adhere to a single voltage range across..." Me: "Please, stop. That you are seeing the keyword 'output power' doesn't make you a circuit designer."
Some rent prices for one-room apartments in Berlin (wg-gesucht.de, 23.12.2017) bit.ly/2zk0J4I. Somehow a non-linear model found its way into the diagram. Linear regression produced the same line as ridge regression, so I didn't show it. Wanted to include more data, but then this caused more traffic than usual and got noticed by the site. My initial idea was to produce all regression lines for the top 30 cities and see how they relate to each other (comparing slopes and intercepts). Just the data for Berlin was over 800 pages, full with offers, so it's understandable that only a very small fraction has been included here. If you see rent prices close to zero, these are for a single night only (and should have been omitted).
Finished reading another article on image optimization, full of advice. Then continued with where I left the "Reminiscences of a stock operator" to come to this slightly amusing piece bit.ly/2zcskF4 that made me think for a while about what I was doing.
The last days in which we could work together this year are slowly approaching. But don't worry, you will have the same opportunity in 2018. Only you know whether you have an issue that has become important to solve and whether working together would be the right fit. As always, plenty of services exist elsewhere.
It is easy to believe that 100ms is a very high bar for good performance in web design, until you hear that to reduce the chance of echo perceived due to reflections from walls (where the perception of the original signal is changed), a sound wave must reach the listener within 50-80ms, at most. Strange that such a simple medium as air can beat high-tech cable. But air doesn't have the notion of a "hop". Staying at maximal distance from the sound source means that the wave would take longest to arrive, enabling one to gauge how the echo could develop in the worst case. With websites, it is similar: Ensure that your customers are at the other half of the hemisphere, accessing your website at a peak time and let them measure the response time. If they report 5s, while you hoped for 1.5s at most, then something needs to change.
If you saw a web page comparing Apple and Google maps in certain locations, you probably loaded ≈70MB of content.
The authors of a newly published article on energy efficiency in CACM bit.ly/2z6BuCJ refer to a study which found that 3G can consume 1.7x more energy than WiFi, whereas 4G can consume about 1.3x more energy than 3G. On an Android device, sending HTTP requests was among the most energy-consuming operations (bad news for mobile web browsing). Third-party advertisement modules can be responsible for up to 75% of the energy consumption of a mobile app (which we already intuitively knew). Displays can drain the battery fast (also not new). On some devices, system calls can be used to estimate the energy consumption (which brings back the memory about strace in me). Blindly downscaling CPU frequency was said to lead to increased energy consumption in some cases, which is rather surprising. That said, we need to try writing applications that don't turn off the device while our website/application is used.
Box office total gross amount per theater for the top 40 Disney movies bit.ly/2z4sHkU. It looks like "The lion king", "Frozen" and "The sixth sense" did relatively well.
Just by connecting carefully positioned parallel lines and selectively shading the space between them, one can arrive at some nice 3D figures from simple 2D lines. Looks so easy and elegant at first sight.
Research titles funded (grants) in the last three years by the Science Foundation Ireland in decreasing order of commitment bit.ly/2z4q8zf. Thanks to the data, learned about many interesting projects and research centers like Lero, for instance.
Didn't know that workers at container docks have an injury rate 3x that of construction work and 8x that in manufacturing. In the past, many people died while being at work. Not surprising when you read how they need to load and unload tons of goods every single day, all the time, no matter the weather conditions, for a low pay. Or how they need to handle both delicate fruits and very long copper bars that don't fit in a barge, so they have to bend them with bare hands, "going home like orangutans". Surprised to hear that in many cases muscle was said to be more important than machinery. If I understood correctly, containers can hold anything, from cars to illegal migrants, every container weighting tons. Tightly packed ones may need to be unloaded directly at the dock, where many stakeholders can appear in place: customs inspectors, buyer's representatives, produce dealers and others, each willing to ensure that the orders have arrived, are valid and in good condition. Can't even imagine what this looks like. The more we approach the busiest time of the year, the more we need to pay attention to the sacrifices these people make, so that others can receive their things on time for the holidays. And the more patience we need once we hear that the post is overloaded with work and delivery delays are possible. If a small delay can prevent injuries elsewhere, then it is perhaps a good one.
Where the thread ends bit.ly/2Bg0Cx0
The sky produced its first tiny fractals today. Still not serious though.
Annual glacier ice volumes (1977 - 2016) bit.ly/2jbEcl5. It hurts to see that according to this study, reaching far into the past, almost 25% of the total volume of all inspected glaciers has been lost.
Coastal sea level rise at some measurement stations in New Zealand (1986 - 2015) bit.ly/2zlwUEf as seen in this dataset bit.ly/2zlncBJ.
Rainfall intensity at different places in New Zealand (1960-2016) bit.ly/2zl5Iph. The values here are given in mm. It seems that Milford Sound had the highest rainfall intensity in this time frame.
Mean maximum ozone hole area and mean minimum ozone concentration in New Zealand (1979 - 2016) bit.ly/2j9odUq
Another important problem is the decrease of bee populations. Yesterday, I saw an article which mentioned that neonicotinoids may be linked with that. I don't know what this means, how it can be measured or how and when data can be made available.
Ocean acidification in New Zealand bit.ly/2zjUKQP using the following data bit.ly/2jdJsor. Not sure what these measurements mean; probably an expert knows better how they affect the ocean acidity. I heard that too much acidity can be deadly for fish and maybe other microorganisms. Someone said that fish population worldwide is decreasing and if this is true, we need to understand our impact on the oceans.
Average daily peak UV index value across all regions in New Zealand (1981 - 2017) bit.ly/2zkedR7. This data by the Ministry for the Environment of New Zealand comprises of over 35 years of daily measurements. Averaging on a daily basis across all regions where measurements were made reveals this nice periodic pattern. We can even try to count whether the number of years correspond to the number of peaks/valleys in the diagram. The description of the dataset bit.ly/2zkerYK says that an UV index of 11 is considered extreme, but in several cases the index reaches higher values than that. When we examine the top 10 days with the highest index values, ranging from 13.73 to 12.6 (25.12.1998, 03.01.1997, 23.01.1997, 02.01.1998, 28.12.1998, 15.01.1997, 23.12.2010, 20.01.1996, 24.12.1998, 28.12.1993), we see that most of them were at the end of December or at the beginning of January. The dates with the lowest values, ranging from 0.1 to 0.2 (18.05.1983, 28.07.1992, 03.06.1992, 29.05.1993, 23.07.1983, 07.06.1986, 03.06.1982, 29.06.1985, 28.06.1995, 20.07.1984) were in May, June (mostly) and July.
Median total sun hours by region in New Zealand (1972 - 2016) bit.ly/2jbBbB5
A short video showing interactive function exploration bit.ly/2jdm6PP. Sometimes it is nice to be able to avoid reloading a big plotting library each time a small change is needed (which is usually quite often). If the cursor seems to move slow, it's partially due to recording itself.
Black-and-white street map of Orlando bit.ly/2jb5CHT. Not properly labeled, since the computation took already enough time and I am reluctant to run it again.
Circle packings can be so beautiful, especially with varying radii.
If you have a large collection of songs, it shouldn't be too hard to make your own application to manage them from within the browser. Perhaps you could find a song you like with 4-5 key presses and play it with a single click. Or create a simple native application.
Noticed that this website works well even on a relatively old mobile phone. Then visited some popular pages through it and the warnings started: "Would you accept this cookie? This one? Maybe this one too? Once or permanently?". Each time a popup appeared, effectively canceling the browsing experience. "Could have been better", I thought.
Tree species with more than 500 exemplars in Rostock bit.ly/2ja14RK. Took longer than I thought it would—there were over 82000 points to plot.
Nice to see that for clothes dryers the removed moisture was given next to the comparative energy consumption. This enabled the moist_CEC index, where the V-ZUG 12006 dryer reaches a value of almost 172 (the lower the better). A model with the worst moist_CEC had an index value slightly over 1014. You can see the best 40 models for which measurements were made bit.ly/2j8PpTh. Once again, the dataset comes from the Australian department of environment and energy.
For the washing machines, I slightly changed the scoring criteria to match electricity_cost_weight * electricity_usage_normalized + water_cost_weight * water_usage_normalized. The electricity cost weight used was 0.1330 (source: bit.ly/2zhzTxy) and water cost weight used was 0.1857 (source: bit.ly/2zhT2PN). If the calculations were correct, a liter water in USA is slightly more expensive on average than a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Since consumption of electricity was in kWh and of water in litres, using the weights would allow to estimate relative operational cost, which is what the score attempts to describe. The highest value reached was 0.282618 (lower is better), meaning that according to this criteria, the most inefficient washing machine is ≈5.8x more expensive to operate than the most efficient one(s). The full list bit.ly/2zhnCcf.
Dishwasher models by their water and electricity consumption bit.ly/2jbfGQR. Note that the first 60 dishwashers on the list were from Fisher & Paykel, which were not shown here in order to include more brands on the list. While the number on the right is a normalized value (in range 0.072594 - 0.859375), it doesn't say anything about the quality of washing, which may be the deciding factor for a buyer.
NetVol to CEC for some fridge/freezer brands bit.ly/2zglrWk
Cooling and heating efficiencies of air conditioners according to the department of the environment and energy, Australia bit.ly/2j77fX1. Highlighted some models that have the highest efficiencies in both categories and then noticed that the top model costs almost 2000 euro. Interesting that many devices tend to be more efficient with heating than with cooling, which I thought was their primary use.
Screen size vs. comparative energy consumption for 1821 computer monitors bit.ly/2j4UeNE. More data could have been even better.
It seems that mining for metals/coal causes the most air pollution in Australia bit.ly/2j7R0ss, at least according to the National Pollutant Inventory bit.ly/2j8BU6l
GDP at current market prices in Singapore (Q1 1975 - Q3 2017) bit.ly/2zgFZOI
I was slightly sceptical what the CyberLink's YouCam software could add to the capabilities of an existing machine. Since CHIP made it available for free as part of their advent calendar bit.ly/2zeEwbE, decided to try it and was pleasantly surprised. It can take images and videos (in my case MP4, up to 1280 x 720, with zoom), which can then be saved to a directory or uploaded to an external service like YouTube. The video quality was good and it captured fast-moving hands well. The interface became simpler once the effects section was closed. If you find youself in a need to record something, present a physical object/product, send a video message to a friend etc., it might be interesting to you. Works on Windows (but download size is ≈380MB). OnlineTV, which allows streaming of most German TV channels, was also a nice addition to the calendar (used an older version that worked nicely before), but the antivirus program prevented me from installing it. As always, if you choose to install anything, you have to ensure that your machine is properly protected.
One disadvantage of some Java projects is that they have code that is hard to browse even after being made public on GitHub. People are expected to look within seven nested directories until they reach a file. It could be that a tool is able to automatically extract the files once loaded, but then every developer is expected to know about it and to be using it. I don't know, I'm not a Java developer, but sometimes I might seek somethink like "machine learning library" where one or more results appear to be implementations in Java. Once I look into the directory structure, it simply defeats me. I think that the term "information architecture" exists for a good reason—the structure of the code and how it is delivered matters exactly as much as the code itself. But this is still not always recognized.
Whether something is built on top of certain technologies (like Kafka, OpenShift and Kubernetes) is rarely of importance to the average person. What they want to know is what the product does, and whether it was created to fix their current pain. Such keywords are foreign language to them; product developers must speak the language of the user. Surprisingly often, product descriptions are either missing/incomplete or made hardly accessible. It is unclear what the unique selling proposition of the product is and why people should buy it. Something that can be fixed.
Interesting to see data that WordPress sites could be slightly slower than websites not relying on a particular platform. But if a requirement sounds like a firm "I need a WordPress website" and no further details are given, then would the designer be happy to engage in work that would make the web slower? Possibly not.
Whenever a client/employer showed no willingness to pay, my willingness to work quickly evaporated. I frequently quit working with others when my interests are hurt and will continue to do so also in 2018. Can't predict what others want in advance, so I cannot serve them effectively unless they took the time to explain it in detail without telling me how I should be doing my work. But if they didn't, it meant that whenever my attention shifted to my next demo, there wouldn't be anyone to disturb me, which is nice too. For this reason, I try to keep my contact list short and question and double-check every addition to it. Facebook and Twitter as platforms already lost their chance to see me again some 5-6 years ago and because of that, you may not be able too. If someone shows no interest to work with me, they can easily find the same quality of service elsewhere, at a much higher price. This doesn't mean that my rates are low. For further details, see the contact page bit.ly/2zebSHF.
Sample plot: "Seeking a relationship between revenue/expenses and outside temperature in a calendar year" bit.ly/2ze4ZpT
Two variants of a four-level grid inspired by seasonal colors bit.ly/2j31fyo. They can be enhanced by populating some of the boxes with low-opacity photos or by other means.
Fatigue takes many forms bit.ly/2j1vntZ
Libraries in Vermont by total operating expense in 2012 bit.ly/2AAaC3Y
Renewable energy generation by source in Hawaii bit.ly/2ylZUIh. Uses this dataset bit.ly/2ylmjp9.
Three quick ideas for C++ code bit.ly/2jGjuKL
"Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings" - Richard Feynman
Visualization of monthly retail sales in two categories (1992 - present) bit.ly/2keKj8f. Updates automatically as soon as Census Bureau updates the data. No actual numbers are displayed, but they stay in relative comparison.
The last sentence in the previous bit is partially a reason why AI, at least in its current flavor, does not excite me much. It uses—mildly said,—more computational resources than I'd like to assign. I cannot support a view, which places "software above everything", does not consider the hardware cost or the importance of the problem. If I needed 12 GPUs to run in parallel for a couple of days to update billion weights, I would be terrified that I am doing something extremely inefficient.
Realized that a small amount of SRAM might be a good idea for a gift to a programmer for the holidays. Consider what this means. It teaches one about the need to keep program size small, to think about efficiency and well-defined output before code ever gets written. It highlights that being more efficient with RAM might scale better than being more efficient with the CPU. It shows that small-sized RAM can be extremely fast (tens of nanoseconds or less). It teaches about not wasting resources (e.g. caused by memory leaks), using the smallest thing that could possibly work. It teaches that working within tight constraints stimulates creativity. It teaches about power-efficiency, since this setup uses less gates, which need less power. It teaches about modularity, since the memory of an entire machine can be assembled from many such parts (a person hosted their website on a self-made device). And that modularity on a breadboard has surprisingly much in common with modularity of code. It teaches about communication complexity, seeing the number of pins that seek to connect with other components. That's also a reminder to think about the component interactions in our programs. It also teaches about bit operations (shifts, masks) used to address resources given a pin identification. It teaches combinatorics, since an effect could be achieved by combining different ideas in different ways, leading to similar results of varying efficiency. It teaches a more holistic view, since with a large number of components, looking at the structure becomes more important than looking at minor details, e.g. treating components in clusters. It teaches that hardware in itself is worthless if not controlled by great software (e.g. device drivers, CPU microcode), but also that software is worthless if it cannot coexist with the reality around us or if the hardware is not available. It teaches about tradeoffs (SRAM vs. DRAM). It teaches about the importance of designing clean interfaces—a box with the device hidden inside looks much better than the look of the chips. It teaches that with a bit more creativity, miniaturization can also happen in code. It teaches that sometimes precise craft can require careful design and simulation, minimization of path lengths and crossings, continuous voltage/current measurements, per-component operational range validation and soldering. A chip can be a part of a plan—a plan to surprise now and then after successful projects and see whether people will be quick to solder (maybe even damage) their chips or will wait to get more to be able to build something bigger. They might even cooperate exchanging chips in order to meet their goals. At last, this might help them see their software from the lens of the hardware that will work with it. In my opinion, an invaluable perspective.
Pre-proceedings from NIPS 2017 are available bit.ly/2AYhkjn. This year once again my abilty to digest that much content will be limited.
Found a dataset of museum visits by year and month. My initial idea was to visualize the changes over time, but then I saw the overwhelming number of museums included. If I included all, the graphic wouldn't be nice to look at and if I included few (which ones?), I'd risk to promote them at the expense of the many. Not surprising that internally something stops me to continue. But at the start everything looked interesting and promising.
Christmas seems already well-planned in Berlin bit.ly/2Bc8cbB. Here are the locations of the markets once again as dots bit.ly/2Ajh1jC. Personally, I can't see myself celebrating it, because to me the entire year is 365x more important than a single day. Year, in which I once again created things I care about, which make me alive and which hopefully touched some of you in a positive sense. I cannot ask for more than this and cannot expect miracles from a single day that is like all others.
Didn't know of the refrigerator quality check: if you put half of a banknote inside and half outside it and pull the banknote towards you, it should tear in half. Nowadays greed is expected even at device level.
Having extensive experience in a field and believing that if you can't fix an issue, noone else should be able to is a classic fallacy. The ability to look beyond yourself is crucial.
Some air conditioners make so much noise. If you disregard the vibrations. Not exactly a good stimulus to mind.
A short list of photovoltaic panel producers according to the "Go Solar California Initiative" bit.ly/2AiH22Q. It's surprising how in a relatively short time many organizations have built their own installations for more sustainable operations. The Queensland University installation looked especially beautiful on a photo.
The difference between gyroscope and accelerometer bit.ly/2AcVj0G somehow reminds me of the beauty of vector fields. And of a funny quote by Steve Jobs.
Estimating printing cost of RFC documents bit.ly/2Ac0Uo3
Interactive map of the air quality index in Europe bit.ly/2zQqBXe ↗
Remember to make everything... bit.ly/2zO9FjQ
Found another interesting CPU related formula: capacity(%) = utilization at CPU base frequency * (current frequency / CPU base frequency). The statement: "A 100% utilized CPU at 1.5Ghz and a 50% utilized CPU at 3.0Ghz have identical capacity."
Advent calendar value estimation bit.ly/2zJ7LAY
Visitors of Chicago public library branches (January - September 2017, log scale) bit.ly/2npQuv2
A visualization of the current sources of interrupts on my machine bit.ly/2nlEOJC. The USB devices could be my keyboard and mouse; ath9k is the network card. Not sure about the meaning of the rest. Timers seem to be connected with lots of interrupts.
Rarely working to satisfy tools. If a tool gives me a certain score, I don't panic but ask myself first whether the scoring criteria reflect the opinion and the thinking of the tool maker. This is surprisingly often the case. But I cannot exclude the possibility that such an opinion could be wrong. Which is why I don't automatically tune my work to the highest score possible. But I have seen people who do it and then say: "Your site scores lower than it could". They immediately assume that I need their website services. The perceived importance of the various checked criteria can matter more than the final score. Sometimes a design recommendation is weighted equally to a usability recommendation, which is questionable. Behind every single word or line of code on this website a decision has been made. A decision unlikely to be seen elsewhere.
Availability is limited, but the moves which lead to it are even more so as risk can be really expensive. Here is the moment to congratulate Canadians for their decision (they know which). I think it sets a great base for more open conversation in the future. One that will hopefully lead to better exchange of know-how, new connections and opportunities. It is not that important whether people will choose to risk or not, but that whenever they do it, they can rely that their decision will be acknowledged. Seeing more countries following this example would make me even more positive about the future.
Most processors are quite intelligent: when not utilized, they enter power-down mode and stay there for as long as needed before entering normal mode for a short time once again. We could learn from that and integrate this idea in our work as well. There is no reason to work at 100% all the time when we are not appreciated at 100%, personally and monetarily. And we can scale down our effort to self-preserving 0% (with processors the current could be in the microamper range) in case we notice forms of disrespect or discrimination. A similar idea was introduced in an article some time ago, which stated that the right way to respond to low payment offers at an interview is by saying: "Well, with that remuneration I won't be able to provide you with (list of functions). Would you then still agree hiring me?". This might sound rude, until you realize that the role of scaling down potential future long-term effort is to ensure self-preservation. It demonstrates a thinking, self-respecting individual who isn't mechanically accepting offers and who understands that only good resources enable them to do good work. What I would like to observe from first hand now is whether a processor truly draws exponentially more current until it reaches 100% utilization. If that's true then we should be asking ourselves whether our "always 100%" lifestyle isn't a high physical tax we pay.
Significant effort that didn't lead anywhere is a wasted effort. Operation under such conditions is simply not sustainable.
With incomplete requirements or unclear goals even the best execution might be seen as "broken" at the end. Can the customer be made happy by providing this solution to them? If not, we are probably working on the wrong project. Requirements elicitation helps to spot problems early and prevent both the developer and the client from wasting time on a bad project. And since it helps both parties keep their face, it is not optional, but rather detailed. If a client insists otherwise and shows that they don't appreciate their own project highly enough, then there is no reason why the designer should do it. Working while the requirements are unknown/unclear is always a mistake.
MySQL utilizes "hero" functions of several screens. Possibly explains why it doesn't work for me.
Root mean square error (RMSE) can be defined on a single line bit.ly/2ngfvbX
Average speeds and car parks occupancy in Birmingham bit.ly/2zAkfLb
Streets in Birmingham on which more than 90000 motor vehicles passed each year from 2000 to 2015 bit.ly/2zz5YhP. There seem to be only two meeting the criteria: A38(M) and M6.
I heard that inspecting streaming data should happen in real-time (single-pass, no-store), but did not know that aircraft engines could have so many monitoring systems which send information to ground stations at high sample rates. A clear case for the need of efficient algorithms on streaming data, because learning something late might be too late.
"More than 480 web firms record 'every keystroke'" bbc.in/2neHlpf. Some even record your entire life, but that's another story.
Trying to understand the meaning of the sentence "We are less us than us" directed me towards this table bit.ly/2nfrXsD in "The microbiome solution" book. After reading that there are about 100 trillion organisms living in the gut (separate article), I was wondering whether there was some smaller dataset available at least to learn about some of the more common types. This is not a small-world graph.
Saw a radar chart presenting multi-dimensional information and reminded myself about the one I created a while ago. Still surprised how succinct, space-efficient and data-rich these diagrams can be.
An attempt to isolate objects in an image bit.ly/2iYv6sc. After the thresholding, some color came through. Fiddling with the details started to take too much time on my machine, so I left it.
A device with good technical characteristics and great design, but bad usability may still not find acceptance once in the hands of the end user.
Path through sightseeings in Paris bit.ly/2iXppe1
Never heard of the Wisconsin breast cancer dataset. Here I tested some classifiers on it to see whether they can recognize the tumors bit.ly/2BgmGTG. Noticed that if the data was not pre-scaled, the accuracy of the SVC classifier could fall to 0.70. Used the StandardScaler, but then remembered that RobustScaler might also be beneficial (it was). The performance of logistic regression (for classification) was slightly surprising for me here (first time using it after hearing only good things about it all the time). But this is a relatively small dataset, where with more data the results may vary. Update: The ROC curves of four of the classifiers are also available bit.ly/2iWXHy9.
A while ago I had the idea to compress an image and compare the output to the input to visualize which pixels were touched. The result was not very informative, since with very few exceptions almost all pixels were affected. But I guess this depends on many factors and likely on the particular characteristics of the image itself as is often the case with image-related algorithms. Anyway, if you find this interesting and have the time for it, you could easily do the same.
While returning a number to take something back, my eyes unintentionally saw an employee working at a nearby monitor. One would think that a big, international retail company would have the resources to improve the interface on which employees work every single day. Surprisingly, not so.
Interesting how many noise complaints in San Francisco were reported over the web (almost as many as by phone). The web system must be very useful since the reports over mobile/open311 are 1.7x less. Not sure why vehicle maintenance noise is so common. "Amplified sound electronics" noise appears on the 5th place, but is more common than noise from traffic, entertainment or public construction, at least in the data provided by the city.
Finding the strength of pairwise relationships among features in the FIFA dataset bit.ly/2iTlG0Y
Measuring variation with z-score bit.ly/2BbPigL
30 seconds of code execution on a fresh Vim installation bit.ly/2iPR6Wc. Does not seem to play well with video recording. But Netrw has a great feature allowing you to open images, papers etc. with a single keystroke. Not sure why, but the papers seem to load slightly faster this way than through the regular file manager on my OS. The few images I opened did not render at their original dimensions, but were for some reason scaled to either be too small or exceed the screen size. As a result, scrollbars appeared and I had to manually resize the pane and use Ctrl + +/-. I noticed that the images were not opened in ImageMagick, but in the PDF viewer too. So there is perhaps an option somewhere that fixes this.
"Our company is an equal opportunity employer and doesn't discriminate based on x, y and z." Can't trust such marketing statements. Discrimination starts from a very young age (by saying you want the Haribo and not the Kinder), so I see no reason why at the workplace it should be non-existent. It even flourishes there. A company with a similar statement will find it hard to involve me in a conversation.
"In order to grow, private companies need to attract and retain high-performing employees which can be a difficult proposition, given that the base salaries within public companies are generally higher than those at private companies." It's easy to suggest this. But low payment (at the publc company), zero respect, zero support in learning, lack of advancement options, lack of clarity about priorities/goals, daily meetings, rumour spreading, internal politics and others have all contributed to making the choice much easier for the high-performing entrepreneur. "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together." - African proverb. Plenty of big companies, where many people worked together, have gone so far that they don't exist anymore. When words like this are used in front of you, be aware of the intentions behind them. Possibly to make you share what you know with your team for free. Because of the inability of many employees to recognize such subtle practices, many companies today continue to operate on their back.
Robots/crawlers seem to be cheap and easy to manipulate. Just mention a keyword that has nothing to do with what you intend and see them looking around for more nonsense. This site is made primarily for you, because you are much more valuable than the average robot. And you can much more easily sense what these robots can't understand.
Whenever I find myself in a state "willing to impress", I pause and ask myself whether my current work really matters. Very often, this isn't the case. "Willing to impress" has never worked for me.
Multiple cursors are nice, but I'd like to have them across applications. For instance, keeping one editor on the left side of the screen and one on the right side. Whenever I press a key and hold it down, I'd like to see both editors rendering the changes at their native speeds to be able to gauge which editor has a smaller overhead while typing (again, on a slow machine, to make this more visible). This is because many editors aren't reacting in a very smooth way to feedback and the cursor frequently pauses for some unknown reason. Reminds me of a janky web page, but where the jank has moved at the cursor level. What happened with the 16.6ms requirement? This is of course only horizontal movement, where the speed of the vertical one is also important, the longer our code and documents become. Comparing vertical scrolling needs to be possible as well, because it greatly affects the speed at which we can access new information. Some editors become noticeably slower with longer text. Just adding the line number then can take a lot of time, which severely interferes with typing. Or they use spell checkers, code style checkers, inefficient autocompletion (taking lots of screen space where maybe only few options are important) and others that make the editors unresponsive. Some people have chosen to work on many small documents, but this only circumvents the problem without really solving it. Now the complexity is handed to the individual, who will have to select the right file among the hundreds available. I would also like to know which translates into less I/O operations: working on one large file or on 20 smaller ones, opened simultaneously. And the switching costs of both. Also the time required for search within the document and whether it is connected with a new window that is hard to close...
That said, my configuration also isn't secret amzn.to/2AZFJ4t. This laptop and what I learned have enabled the hundreds of demos on this website. On such a slow, single-core machine you can quickly see any inefficiencies your code might have. You can also easily evaluate the quality of the software pushed online or see that the stars on GitHub may not guarantee it. In case the code monopolizes the CPU, it wouldn't matter much that AI techniques were used or that a beautiful animation was rendered, for instance. Wasting CPU cycles to be able to speak in a modern language, or compute for the sake of computation, is not a good use of machine resources. Being slow, the laptop also produces less heat and noise and wastes less electricity (a peak of 16W, according to CHIP). It is lightweight and likely suitable for traveling (new battery could last ≈7-8 hours). Has 3GB RAM (expandable to 4GB, maybe more) and 320GB Hitachi disk (could be eventually replaced with SSD), which were enough to me in most cases, except when trying to learn from really big datasets. An external monitor like LG 2361V (TN matrix, not IPS) allows me to read at 1920x1080, which for long texts/specifications/documentations is not only convenient, but necessary. But working on it is not completely strain-free, especially after long hours. Needed to attach a keyboard (a relatively cheap, but not bad Cherry KC1000), since the "e" key stopped working (then I started seeing how often this letter appeared everywhere). Bought the laptop second-hand with Win7 preinstalled and had to wait for it a month. Then it came with a broken USB port and a missing latch connecting the body to the display (so that the cable there is visible). The BIOS was also inaccessible. Yet, somehow I learned to live with these defects which were not disclosed in advance. Found that it worked really slow in Win7, especially when copying large amounts of files (could easily take many hours). After switching to Mint and latest kernel, I was amazed about the file transfer speeds. HD video watching on Win7 was almost impossible; now there are cases when a video runs smooth at 70-80% CPU utilization. Although this configuration has served me well, it has also constrained me in being unable to achieve more. As they say, first you own it, then it owns you.
It is worth reminding that having a 10x faster machine than someone else isn't a sufficient reason to claim that they have suddenly become 10x less productive or that they deserve to be paid 10x less for their work. This is a very fast way to end a conversation before it has even started. Worth mentioning it since some people continue to seek significance through the hardware they obtain. This can be seen in various forums, where instead of simply saying their name, they are listing their entire configuration in the smallest detail as if it mattered more than who they are. If the goal is to make others feel inferior, there will always be some quick way like this to do it.
Observing the SPEC CPU2017 performance results in 3D bit.ly/2B02tS7. What I learned from manual rotations locally is that a Xeon Platinum 8180 @ 2500Mhz with ≈220 cores and slightly more than 3TB RAM almost reaches the performance of Xeon E7-8890 @ 2200Mhz with ≈400 cores and slightly less than 4TB RAM. Unfortunately, stopped changing azimuth and elevation early, mainly due to the performance of my integrated graphics.
You can also turn off some devices in your laptop that you use very rarely or not at all. Touchpad? Having a mouse. Network interface for cable Internet? Using WLAN (another interface). In need to be constantly connected to the router while reading locally stored papers or reading/writing code? Turn off WLAN. Bluetooth enabled all the time? Off. Print spooler, SD card and/or other services? Careful. Browser having 20 tabs left open? Can be CPU and memory hungry. Sound card? Rarely used. The blinking LED in the monitor? Annoying. Is the monitor shining brighter than needed? Probably more so in darker months, adjust. (Intel: At maximal brightness setting, the monitor could draw 2x the power needed at the minimal.) Having a sound volume option showing in the OSD? Not needed, volume off. Could you use one bigger RAM module instead of two smaller ones? Letting the machine sleep after being inactive for 30mins, while turning off the monitor earlier? Would you choose suspend (to RAM) or hibernate (to disk) at night? You probably have a lot more ideas than me, but they will be specific to your machine.
Sorted the lightbulbs by efficacy on the EnergyStar website, which allowed me to see exactly the result I wanted without having to obtain all the data and spend time analyzing it myself. The best ones achieved ≈133.3 lumens/watt, which is up to 3.3x better than anything I have seen so far (cannot speak of the quality of the light itself). This means that 2 newer lightbulbs taken together will shine stronger than a chandelier having 5 "energy-efficient" lightbulbs from a couple of years ago, not to speak about a chandelier with 3 classic 100W lightbulbs. So it is not only important to have all sockets filled, but also see how they are filled. There may be an opportunity to remove extraneous lights and only keep as much luminous flux as needed.
Cost savings as a result of EnergyStar certifications in US cities bit.ly/2izQgwx. Even when Washington, D.C. has the most certified buildings, according to EnergyStar, the cost savings in three other cities are now higher.
Seeking volunteers? No. Many companies have been grown by volunteers, since they weren't paying their employees. Not participating in their plans, because it would mean that I support those. Also not freelancing, since I don't believe that skills which were obtained very slowly over a period of many years should be available to anyone at a burger price. The price at which the client wants to be served is also not interesting to me.
Went out of the store, barely able to breathe. Too many people, all cashiers busy. Spent 15mins waiting. Thought: "All these people can pay the store, but can't pay for my web design or programming skills. Really?" Explains why similarly to how I worked in 2009, I continue not to serve those who show even the slightest signs of disrespect. (Non-payment is a form of disrespect.) I prefer to see them only once then. And that behavior I will keep in any situation, any circumstance, in any company or country. Unconditionally. Explains why the contact page hasn't changed since 2009 and why I still continue the appreciate the same basics.
Strange thought added to my diary/ideary: "After classifying mushrooms as edible or poisonous, you must be willing to taste them in order to (empirically) verify your result." Not sure from where this one came. Reminds me of the ancient architects who built arcs and then spent time below them to ensure that their construction wasn't life-threatening.
Learning about electricity from wind bit.ly/2ASF4li. At least in Europe some numbers seem to have changed since 2013 bit.ly/2itDdNi.
Sometimes the result of your code surprises you just to find out that the initial data you started with is spurious or hasn't been collected consistently across all observations. For instance, how is it possible to compare CO2 emissions between cities, when one city reported measurements from 2010, another from 2012 and when the measurements have been made by likely different instrumentation? This makes the data incomparable and limits its usefulness. Or how can we find which cities have a similar electricity generation profile (mix of coal, gas, oil, nuclear, hydro, biomass, wind, geothermal, solar, fossil and non-fossil), when it is unclear whether zeros are true zeros or stay for missing data. Then cosine similarity would not work as expected, placing Paris, France next to Vitória, Brazil and Caracas, Venezuela. Garbage in, garbage out.
"I'll be in Phoenix tomorrow and would like to prepare something with jam and (crushed) nuts, but don't know whether there's a farmer's market that offers them both. Could you help by pointing me at a concrete website?" (Head scratching, dataset load, script execution). Only result: http://www.uptownmarketaz.com.
One restriction of the web that still hasn't been removed many years later: million items. When I started with web design, I wanted to see a color picker that shows each individual color (you can still see how it looked on the main page). You might say that my initial idea was stupid and that "in no way" should I have attempted to render million items on a page. Or that the web simply hasn't been made for this. I have a different opinion and see it as a restriction of the web platform. Because I cannot exclude the possibility that valuable problems with size larger than a million exist, whose solving deserves to be possible on the web. (For now, suppose someone wanted to show you an interactive version of the genetic code that determined your illness.) So I am not simply speaking about rendering million splines, million polygons with 10 vertices each, million images and so on. This wasn't my goal. I wanted million simple DOM elements with background color mainly to see the maximal problem complexity that the browser can work with. Or at least a canvas element that would enable the equivalent. You can imagine that nothing worked. Today the problem sizes are even bigger than the ones from ten years ago. Datasets of terabytes are available for donwload and they likely contain a lot more instances than a million. I remember that back then, rendering 60000-80000 elements took 30-40 seconds; yesterday I found that a simple addition to an accumulating variable billion times (or 1000 millions) in C took me around 3-4 seconds. The number of iterations is 12500x bigger while the time is 10x less. I understand that C didn't have to concatenate or parse the string as HTML and render it or show a browser interface, but sometimes I wonder where all the speed invisibly disappears.
If the web continues to become slower over time, the big winner from this will be fast native applications, new operating systems and updates that make them faster. It becomes cheaper to donwload 20 papers at once and read them offline in a fast native PDF reader than to pay the cost of waiting for the Arxiv to load 20 times and to download a single paper for viewing in the browser. People will also start spending less time on the web when it no longer matches well what they are looking for. Linux and Chrome, for instance, appear to take a different approach—they have become slightly faster with each new version. But even so, this cannot reduce the overall site delivery time, when the size of the content has grown much faster.
If you gave me your 4MB web page, I would probably reduce its size ten times and still believe it was too big. Unfortunately, 3-4MB is on the way to become an accepted reality with expectations that "users find videos more engaging, so we need to have them". Personally, I don't watch videos as I find that my time is not well spent on them. The last full-time movie I watched was many years ago. In addition to the multiple JavaScript frameworks found on many sites, what happened with the content? It became a filler, saying mostly nothing, lacking substance. To find a valuable sentence means to spend an entire afternoon reading content of questionable value (which is likely why videos become increasingly popular). "Page size isn't the right metric to track, but perceived performance". Please, do not say this in front of me. As if the browser won't have more work to do once it registers an interaction. As if it won't have to download these chunks of now increased size. As if it won't need more parse and execution time. As if it won't waste more battery during the interaction process. As if it won't need more storage to cache the content (have you tried to clean your browser cache recently?). 4MB are 4MB when downloaded fully, no matter how we look at it. It is not that this single website will determine how the web "feels like" or how fast it is to browse, but each site will contribute. Especially on slow networks and devices people will feel the difference if they intended to learn and found that this can start 20 seconds later, for each website they visit. Can't imagine the cost of this on a world scale.
Disliking datasets with potentially lots of content, but with screenfuls of missing data. A waste of storage and CPU cycles. bit.ly/2ijlRma. Heard something about mechanically replacing the missing data with the average...
Wheat, rice, maize and soybean production by country over time bit.ly/2AKwTHL. Original data: bit.ly/2ihIQhu. Seems like some countries are capable of projecting 10 years in advance.
Checking nearby stations bit.ly/2AHo7ui
Currently available bikes and docks at bike stations in Barcelona bit.ly/2igdOpU. Learned that I shouldn't try to open unexpectedly big XML files in the browser (machine became unresponsive for ≈10 mins). Interest for the city came after I saw a publication, which ranked the city at the second place among the most open ones. The article mentioned that it used data to adjust the intensity of city sprinklers based on the predicted precipitation. I expected most of the information to be available only in Spanish, but was pleasantly surprised that English text was available too.
88 million trips since 2010 bit.ly/2icvcMt ↗. Single graphic (stacked bars) showing the cities where biking is most developed (also could help to look for more data). It is interesting that in 2012, New York was almost non-present, while in 2016 it reached the largest ridership base. The cyclist on the left is a nice addition to the chart, which tells me what it is about. I like it.
Annual wasted fuel due to congestion bit.ly/2icF2Oc ↗
Saw a photo of the giant screen on which Alibaba tracked the number of sales in real time (on its last big event).
Current bike and dock availability at various bike stations in Toronto bit.ly/2Ayni6U. Updated: Fetchng the data asynchronously reduced the load time from approx. 3.42s to 1.62s (measured only once).
Median electricity usage/day at various council buildings in Bath & North East Somerset bit.ly/2i8dAB8. You can see the distributions for the top3 buildings by the hour. Original dataset: bit.ly/2i9LQMT contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Libraries, fitness centers and parks in Huntsville, Alabama bit.ly/2i9udwo (via the city of Huntsville open data portal)
Actual travel speed in Adelaide, Australia (1994-2014) bit.ly/2i7meQw. Somewhere I saw mentioned that the average travel speed is very important performance indicator for roads. This dataset shows that it isn't static, but changes during the day. If it decreases too much, this may indicate congestion or a newly arising need to modernize the road network. Economies which can transport people and goods faster, have an advantage. This means that we can compare data across several cities to explore if there are opportunities for improvement. You can also explore how the travel speed changes by route bit.ly/2i8hdqM.
Beer consumption per capita, grape yield per hectar, wine production per capita, wine consumption per capita by country between 2000 and 2009 bit.ly/2i7Zn7k. The dataset is provided by the Wine Economics Research Center at the University of Adelaide. Grape yield per hectar shows that there is probably some unused potential in some countries. Wondered who drinks all these bottles of alcohol in the stores.
Locations of the litter bins in Adelaide, Austrlia bit.ly/2AxReQp. Also enjoyed the historic images of the city, made available by the city council.
Tourism expenditure in South Australia over time bit.ly/2i6KQsx
Features of the parks in South Australia bit.ly/2i6oJT7
Hourly measurements at Civic, Florey and Monash air stations in South Australia (near Canberra, 2012-2017) bit.ly/2i59QQW (data source: bit.ly/2AvNJtK). Did not include all air quality variables (excludes NO2 and CO). Initially wanted to make an interactive demo (showing the graph only when over a station point), but then decided that I would need too many line elements. Transforming a big dataset each time it has been downloaded didn't seem to support what I wanted: fast real-time usage.
Passengers served by year at different airports in London (2004-2014) bit.ly/2AxDGEB. Via a dataset from the London data store. The numbers give the impression that Southend was growing quite fast. When we put the numbers in context, we see that in absolute numbers Heathrow has grown more, but relatively to the starting period, 2004, it grew only 1.093x, while Southend grew from 3224 to 1102260 passengers, or the equivalent of 341.89x. Really impressive.
According to this dataset bit.ly/2Av4ncS, in 2010, actual energy electricity usage/unit area at Wyndley Leisure Centre was more than three times higher than that of the Leeds City Council. Aqua Vale, which is a swimming and fitness center ranked third. In 2008, Birmingham City Council was first.
Libraries in Birmingham bit.ly/2i1qqBm ↗
Nights at accomodation establishments by region in Steiermark, Austria bit.ly/2i2bIKq
Weather conditions in Salzburg, Austria at 30-minute intervals bit.ly/2hZfZhK
Au Bon Pain lists the ingredients, serving size and calories of each soup. Brain: "Predict the calories based on...". Internal voice: "Small training set? General enough? Don't think so."
Used data from Wikipedia, a contour map and canvas to plot the 50 biggest cities in India bit.ly/2hWCC6b. Some labels have been hidden to avoid overlapping text (if you look at the code, you can see which ones). Learned that Howrah is a twin city to Kolkata and that there are many big cities near Mumbai (including Navi Mumbai, which I never heard about). The same is valid around the area of Delhi, where I needed to hide three more labels. Without interactive elements, the total size has become 15.8kB. Drawing on canvas requires JavaScript; the same could have been achieved if through a server-side language we generated an SVG. However, an SVG would use 100 elements only for the points and labels and a single path element describing the contour map, weighting 99kB. With canvas, we use a single element.
Street trees with more than 1000 exemplars in Waterloo, Canada bit.ly/2AnSmpJ. The grey areas indicate other tree types. This time I didn't include the concrete counts.
San Francisco Airport monthly utility consumption for natural gas, water, and electricity bit.ly/2AmKa9m. The periods when the data was captured range from 01.2010 to 09.2017.
San Francisco beaches water quality, total coli concentration (14.08.2017 - 07.11.2017, weekly) bit.ly/2AmUyxI. The source dataset was said to be "not updated", but actually contains some recent sampling dates. This allows us to show a page with the latest measurements if we knew the thresholds that separated the categories "good", "fair", "bad" and so on. Perhaps you have an idea how to make an app from it rather than a simple visualization.
Average weekly wage by sector in Virginia (Q1, 2017) bit.ly/2AnMBbR
Libraries in Virginia Beach, Virginia bit.ly/2hWl7TJ
Trying to understand some tabular results obtained from the Swiss food composition database bit.ly/2An6PSK. A following on my two other tables from USDA and matvaretabellen. Each result says something and in the unity of all current and future sources we might start seeing patterns which appear more frequently. But we'll see.
Types of street trees with more than 1000 exemplars in Belfast bit.ly/2AkbtRE
According to a study of some trams, covering their wheels to make them invisible could reduce noise by 6-9 dB, which I found interesting. But saw many trams in Germany, which followed this design.
It's very hard to concentrate on an article when things like this bit.ly/2hSVbs7 always find their place. Some people still believe that the web must be exclusively for ads. The web des