These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• ‘The aim is to pro­duce maps that gov­ern­ments can­not ignore’ | berfrois

  “Con­sider events in the Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of the Congo, for­merly Zaire. There, in the after­math of a long civil war, the gov­ern­ment is cur­rently zon­ing its forests — which cover as much as 316 mil­lion acres, an area nearly the size of France, Ger­many and Spain com­bined — in prepa­ra­tion for their mass allo­ca­tion to log­ging com­pa­nies. Old Euro­pean tim­ber con­glom­er­ates want to reac­ti­vate their con­ces­sions, some dat­ing back almost to the bru­tal days more than a cen­tury ago when the entire coun­try was run by King Leopold of Bel­gium. Log­ging new­com­ers from Malaysia and China also want a slice of the action.”
  
  GIS map­ping cor­po­ratism activism ontological-​​war

• How fast is bit packing?

  On my mac­book air (Intel core i7), I get that the unpack­ing speed is not very sen­si­tive to the spe­cific num­ber of bits: gen­er­ally, the smaller the bit width, the faster the unpack­ing. The pack­ing speed is much faster when the bit width is 8 or 16. Even so, the dif­fer­ence is only by a fac­tor of two or so. The results are pre­sented in the next fig­ure. On the y axis, you have the time (smaller is bet­ter). On the the x axis, we have the num­ber of bits we packed to. For exam­ple, when bit is 1, we pack 32 inte­gers into a sin­gle 32-​​bit word. When the num­ber of bits is set to 32 bits, we have a reg­u­lar copy.
  
  algo­rithms nudge-​​targets