Magnetized spheres

08/08/09 18:15 Filed in: games
Interesting things to do with large numbers of small magnetic spheres:

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Reconstructing the world, many photos by many photos by many photos

17/04/09 12:14 Filed in: data visualization

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Minimalist meteorological forecasting

21/03/09 12:10 Filed in: prediction
Question: is it going to rain today?
is it going to rain?

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Sheep patterns

18/03/09 18:07 Filed in: prediction

[sullivan, etc.]

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Hummingbirds, feeding, palm of hand

15/03/09 19:22 Filed in: nature

Ruby-throated Hummingbird Eating From My Hand (Part One) from Russ Thompson on Vimeo. Found here.
[sullvian, etc.]

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Super Bowl tweeting

02/02/09 22:27 Filed in: behavior | data visualization
Replay the Super Bowl through the lens of twitter [nytimes]:
2009-02-02superbowltweets

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Free play

28/01/09 21:10 Filed in: play | creativity
Some evidence and arguments for why unstructured play is crucial in across-the-board development of individual competency. Play is good presumably not just for development but continued evolution, and at least maintenance, later on in life. Related: School recess helps with behavior too (entirely reasonable but it’s an obviousness now enhanced with supporting numbers).

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Find the star

28/11/08 09:16 Filed in: socialization
Hoshi Saga one, two, and three: Suites of diverse flash games ranging in trickiness with the simple task of finding a star. hoshisaga1

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The universe, logarithmically

23/11/08 15:29 Filed in: creativity
The universe seems may seem empty but we just need to see things logarithmically (we hear that way). Here’s everything according to xkcd (from people up). A snippet:
xkcd482height_piece
From people on down is here.

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Wall Street and the three decades of the 1980's

23/11/08 15:08 Filed in: play | contagion
Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, investigates the recent financial explosion. Mindboggling, terrible, and yet relieving; I admit that little of Wall Street has ever made sense to me. A few pieces:

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.


Eisman stuck to his sell rating on Lomas Financial, even after the company announced that investors needn’t worry about its financial condition, as it had hedged its market risk. “The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

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Groups kicking the habit

16/11/08 16:53 Filed in: contagion | health
Christakis and Fowler find more interesting social aspects in the Framingham cohort, this time in how people stop smoking. The nutshell visualization is here.

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Self-reported moods from the 2008 US election

15/11/08 22:00 Filed in: politics
The New York Times surveyed readers’ mental states during Election Day, 2008, and produced a dynamic summarizing graphic (a `word train’) which is worth perusing.

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Height and the complexities of societal health

06/11/08 16:53 Filed in: health
`The Height Gap’ ( Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, April 5, 2004): how the average height of a country’s people appears to reflect a greater societal wellbeing. Eat well, grow well.

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A spreadworthy message

05/11/08 19:20 Filed in: contagion
An excellent viral video from a recent political campaign.

Recipients of this video (with of course their own name inserted) could easily send the video to friends by entering first names, last names, and email addresses. In my view, the cost of passing on this joke, like all good jokes, was low and due to the pieces quality and creativity, the incentive was high (not for everyone of course).

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Corporate contagion

05/11/08 19:19 Filed in: contagion | health
The social network component of the spreading of spreading. (The main article is here.)


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The diffusion of retail establishments

05/11/08 19:17 Filed in: contagion
The spreading of certain buildings across the United States.


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The non-fixedness of ability

10/10/08 14:39 Filed in: psychology

A short article on how the perception of talent as immutable and innate versus evolvable plays out (NY Times):

“Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,” says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology.

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

In this case, nurture wins out over nature just about every time.

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Math is hard...

04/10/08 23:01 Filed in: mathematics
Stephen Colbert on how algebra is hard (and perhaps impossible and evil):

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Identity, Self-Awareness, and Twitter

26/09/08 14:44 Filed in: communication
From the New York Times Magazine, a great, mutlifacted article about how we communicate online.

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Political book preferences

11/09/08 08:35 Filed in: politics
Amazon has an interactive map of the US showing which political books are bestsellers as a function of state. You’ll notice that Vermont is rather blue.

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The end is nigh...

10/09/08 13:27 Filed in: science
As we record more and more information about ourselves and everything around us, Chris Anderson argues in Wired that the end of theory is nigh. (He’s certainly not the first to do so.)

It’s certainly true that we have moved into an age of data abundance as far as social sciences go. It’s worthwhile to simply dive into these streams of data and look for patterns. Questions will naturally appear, we will search more, and theories will form. And while simple theories may not be available for many problems, we at least have the task of improving the science of description.

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