These are my recent Pinboard.in links:

• Kansas City Star: Tornado response shows it’s time to re-think the way we run America – Boing Boing

  "Here's the big picture: If the United States is to the point at which helping disaster victims means cutting other needed programs, it's time to rethink the way we're running this country. Today, Americans have the lightest total tax burden they've had since 1958. One result of that low tax burden, and the resulting inadequate federal and state revenue, is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency faces a $3 billion shortfall. And that's before the Joplin bills arrive.

  Overly optimistic projections during good times brought us to this point. Pandering politicians agreed to tax cuts that this country could not afford. But that's the past. Going forward, we must be able to agree it is un-American to scramble and bicker over priorities every time nature strikes."

  conservatism Republicans politics greed disaster it's-not-a-community-when-you-have-no-empathy

• The Rude Pundit

  "remember: the government giving massive amounts of money to corporations to hire people to do shit is capitalism; the government just hiring people to do shit is socialism"

  education conservatism we're-fucked

• QR Codes, more than you want to know. | Tri Win

  "Warning: I am a designer by trade so I may get a little over excited about this bit. You do not have to slap an ugly QR Code on well designed media. QR Codes are just now going main stream so they tend to be the focus of the media they are included in. Big black and white squares positioned right in your face.  For now this makes sense since the marketers using them tend to need to educate their audience on what they are and how to use them. As they become more common they will become something people will look for, like a web address, allowing designers to integrate functional QR art seamlessly with their design. Just because they are traditionally black and white does not mean they should be. QR codes:

  • Can be any color
  • Can be any modular material
  • Must have at least 55% contrast between the foreground and the background
  • Should have a margin or “quiet space” of 4 units
  • Need to have clear detection patterns in the corner
  • Can have up to 30% of the code obscured if you use the highest error correction
  • Can be read with any orientation
  • Can put it in perspective
  • Can be anamorphic (widescreen)
  • Can have the cell shape distorted
  • Can have the interior made of circle or other shapes
  • can have the design reversed."

  QR-codes data internet-of-things barcodes via:vielmetti

• Novelty Search Users Page

  "This page provides information on the use and implementation of novelty search, an evolutionary search method that takes the radical step of ignoring the objective of search and instead rewarding only behavioral novelty. This visual demonstration (requires modern browser, IE users may need to install a plugin) contrasts a search for novelty with a search for the objective."

  evolutionary-algorithms diversity innovation learning-by-doing gptp-2011

• Best Illusion of the Year Contest

  "The Best Visual illusion of the Year Contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community. Contestants from all around the world submitted novel visual illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2009), and an international panel of judges rated them and narrowed them to the TOP TEN. At the Contest Gala in the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, the top ten illusionists presented their creations and the attendees of the event voted to pick the TOP THREE WINNERS!"

  via:Jason-H-Moore optical-illusions contest psychology cognition nudge-targets

• Dissection — from Wolfram MathWorld

  "Any two rectilinear figures with equal area can be dissected into a finite number of pieces to form each other. This is the Wallace-Bolyai-Gerwien theorem. For minimal dissections of a triangle, pentagon, and octagon into a square, see Stewart (1987, pp. 169-170) and Ball and Coxeter (1987, pp. 89-91). "

  geometry mathematical-recreations nudge-targets

• Michael Cohen, University of Michigan | Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational Studies

  Routine Matters: New Foundations for the Study of Recurring Organizational Action Patterns

  Michael-Cohen habit Pragmatism lecture organizational-behavior cognition learning

• CoffeeScript in Motion | Free PeepCode Blog

  "CoffeeScript is beautiful. It’s sensibly designed around syntactic indentation. It adds useful features to JavaScript. Most importantly, it’s a very thin layer over JavaScript. For any line of CoffeeScript, one can easily predict the line of JavaScript that the compiler will emit."

  CoffeeScript javascript tutorial screencast

• Things I love about Founder’s Co-op and Our Makeshift Receptionist – A Sack of Seattle

  "One interesting phenomenon is that some of the best seats in the house (near the windows, plenty of natural light, good access to the bathroom and kitchen) are avoided like the plague because they're too near the front entrance. Nobody wants to be mistaken for the receptionist. (Which we don't have.)  With 22 companies, 5 conference rooms, and a speakeasy throughout our 2 floors, guests need to be pointed in the right direction. The problem is that on busy days that could easily mean 15+ interruptions…not ideal for productivity."

  coworking collaboration community workantile-exchange

• Reality-based journalism? — Crooked Timber

  "Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of events, minor in themselves, and unlikely to have counted for much in the past, that fit the frame “Republicans=delusion”."

  politics media reporting delusion pragmatism-it-ain't

• Paul Ryan, Republicans, And Generational Politics | The New Republic

  "The Ryan plan, in other words, delivers to the older generation exactly what they’ve had all their lives—secure and predictable benefits—and to the next generation, more of what they’ve known—insecurity and risk. It’s hardly the first generational fight the GOP has started. The previous one was just last fall, when they campaigned for Medicare, and against the $500 billion in cuts (mostly by getting rid of the overgenerous subsidies to private insurers in an experimental program) passed as part of the Affordable Care Act. With an off-year electorate that was overwhelmingly older, they could put all their bets on the older side, knowing that seniors would see little benefit from the Affordable Care Act and were naturally worried about any change to the health system they enjoyed."

  via:poormojo conservatism cultural-dynamics culture-war Republicans public-policy

• The War on Sharing [Infographic] – ReadWriteCloud

  "With Box, the customers are businesses for the most part. That is a key difference to other challenges by the RIAA. And It sets up a conflict between service providers and their clients who now face a determined media industry with a historic interest in litigation to protect its copyrights."

  RIAA copyright sharing corporatism public-policy intellectual-property reintermediation

• Slowing down matrix multiplication in R | (R news & tutorials)

  "The main source of this speed penalty is an insistence that the result of a matrix multiply should follow R’s rules for handling infinity, NaN (not-a-number), and NA.  These rules correspond to what happens with ordinary arithmetic operations on modern computers, which follow a standard for floating-point arithmetic in which, for example, 0/0 is NaN.  You might therefore think that nothing special is needed to arrange for matrix multiplies to produce NaNs as required.  However, R does matrix multiplications using the BLAS library, which comes in many versions, some of which may try to speed things up by avoiding “unnecessary” operations such as multiplication by zero — assuming that that will always result in zero.  However, zero times NaN or infinity is supposed to be NaN, not zero."

  R-language computational-complexity algorithms nudge-targets

• Twitter / @Jason H. Moore, Ph.D: Someone should write a #GP …

  genetic-programming-target cognition ideas

• Calculated Risk: Walking Away in Chicago

  "…These properties with large negative equity positions are like ticking time bombs for the banks. Eventually these owners will grew tired of the monthly loss, and try to take action. Corelogic reported there were 11.1 million properties with negative equity at the end of last year, and close to 5 million properties with more than 25% negative equity."

  financial-crisis housing-crisis bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now

• space1970: STAR TREK Animated PSA

  "This is a genuine YouTube rarity: a Star Trek public service announcement produced by Filmation Studios for the Keep America Beautiful anti-pollution campaign, from the early 1970s. Featuring the voices of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and George Takei."

  nostalgia video crowdsourcing-isn't-new public-service-announcement

• Taibbi: “US Politics – Reality Show Sponsored by Wall Street” « naked capitalism

  "Taibbi discusses the lack of financial reform and failure to prosecute Wall Street…"

  financial-crisis public-policy economics bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now

• Usage – GitHub

  "Jekyll at its core is a text transformation engine. The concept behind the system is this: you give it text written in your favorite markup language, be that Markdown, Textile, or just plain HTML, and it churns that through a layout or series of layout files. Throughout that process you can tweak how you want the site URLs to look, what data gets displayed on the layout and more. This is all done through strictly editing files, and the web interface is the final product."

  Ruby library GitHub web-design markup toolkit

• digital digs: digital authorship, computers and writing #cwcon

  "What should be amazingingly clear is that books–trade publishers, self-publishers, ebooks, etc–are doing fine, but scholarly books are bankrupt. The old style academic blogs that many of my colleagues used to keep may be fading but blogging is shifting and proliferating. Writing is alive and growing. I imagine it has little concern for the humans that hitch a ride to it. Stop trying to save the monograph and instead try to answer the question that the monograph was originally developed to answer: how can I communicate with the world?"

  academic-culture publishing disintermediation-in-action driving-each-other-into-a-ditch

• The Economic Outlook as of May 2011: Yes, This Is Called the Dismal Science. Why Do You Ask? – Grasping Reality with a Flexible Trunk

  "As the foundations of this crisis were laid, there were always arguments against massive regulatory intervention to deal with it. Those arguments always sounded convincing. The stayed convincing even as the situation transformed itself from a justified boom in long duration assets driven by advances in diversification and by capital inflows pushing down interest rates, to froth, to irrational exuberance, to a full-fledged bubble."

  financial-crisis hindsight economics bubble woops

• BBC News – Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images

  "More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings."

  remote-sensing archaeology Egyptology history data-driven

• Loser men — Marginal Revolution

  "That cyclical component accounts for a lot of the short-run variation in hiring, but if you’re estimating the response to a demand shock, longer-term supply trends matter too and often they matter a great deal.  If Ph.d. programs were stricter about enforcing standards of quality and relevance, rather than stringing along students to maintain the flow of revenue to the graduate program, the short run negative demand shocks would lead to a much less severe queuing problem.  That’s simple microeconomics, and it should be macroeconomics too."

  economics academic-culture graduate-school macroeconomics disintermediation-targets

• Raghuram Rajan on Delineating the Role of Government « naked capitalism

  "In this interview, Rajan, who famously told Greenspan at his last Jackson Hole conference that recent changes in financial services industry policy had increased risk, takes on the question of the role of government. He contends that economists have neglected this issue due to overspecialization."

  interview financial-crisis public-policy economics

• Great Firewall Founder Gets a Boot Upside the Head

  "…"Earlier this year Fang closed a microblog within days of opening it after thousands of Chinese internet users left comments, almost all of them deriding him. They attacked him as 'a running dog for the government' and 'the enemy of netizens.'"

  According to the Associated Press, who spoke to local police, Chinese authorities are searching for the egg-loving shoe-thrower. Fang's office, however, denies the attack happened at all."

  censorship how's-that-whole-Westphalian-State-thing-working-out? disintermediation-in-action China

• The Return of the Phantom Time Menace « Easily Distracted

  "In many ways, this intensified recurrence may be something we can learn from rather than worry about. I think it’s sociologically interesting when or if readers have the same reaction to these kinds of fringe stories as they recur and recirculate. It tells us something about where such stories exist in larger productions of knowledge and information, that we have a firmly marked off niche for “well, that’s nuts but non-offensively so”. The story makes no lasting impression on us, we don’t learn it or incorporate it, it doesn’t challenge us, but we also have a continuing expectation that these stories will continue to be with us and continue to be of interest to us. We’re not repelled by them, not transformed by them, we expect them and find them momentarily intriguing."

  psychoceramics sociology cultural-dynamics conspiracy-theories belief

• "Big Memory" Company Terracotta Snapped Up by Europe’s Fourth Largest Software Company

  "In-memory is a hot topic right now, thanks in part to SAP pushing its in-memory analytics platform HANA at Sapphire last week. HANA, however, is not a direct competitor to BigMemory. According to RedMonk co-founder James Governor, competitors include Oracle Coherence, IBM eXtreme Scale, Hazelcast and Gigaspaces.

  "Indeed distributed cache is well known enough to be seen as a 'competitor' to NoSQL approaches," Governor wrote. "Both take load off the database – less database work generally means greater scalability""

  software-architecture distributed-processing data-analysis database open-source

• Why Google Is Selling Bonds – Seeking Alpha

  "In short, Google is borrowing $3 billion at a yield that is just about the lowest yield in modern U.S. history. The Federal Reserve has been trying very hard to convince the world to borrow dollars, and Google is simply taking its advice. If corporate tax rates decline in the next year or so — a bet that looks more attractive almost every day — and if the economy improves and interest rates rise, Google will have executed a very profitable trifecta: It could repatriate its cash at a lower tax rate and buy back its bonds at a discount.
  And even if none of this works out, Google's cost of borrowing $3 billion will only be about 2.3%, which in an historical context is not very much. And if the dollar continues to depreciate, then borrowing dollars today in order to keep cash abroad will also prove to be a profitable strategy."

  finance investing instructive-commentary

• Chatbox – Project collaboration inside Dropbox

  "Chatbox makes it easy to discuss or comment on files shared over Dropbox. Install it, right click on any files / folders inside Dropbox, and start conversations with people you shared the Dropbox folder with."

  collaboration MacOS DropBox file-sharing

• Cool Tools: 303 Aerospace Protectant

  "Back in the early 1970's Armorall was introduced and quickly adopted by car owners and others who wanted to keep plastic components looking their best and lasting as long as possible. 303 Aerospace Protectant is the professional-grade version of this kind of product, and I have yet to find anything better."

  hints-from-Everyone cleaning maintenance

• Why Gingrich Matters « The Reality-Based Community

  "Gingrichism is the philosophy that all means short of illegality are fair game in the struggle for political power.  He came to the fore in the House minority by personal attacks on other members’ patriotism; he stirred up the Republican base with the argument that the Democrats were not merely wrong, but evil and a threat to the Republic.  As Speaker, he destroyed the existing committee structure and bill mark-ups, did away with Congressional institutions to educate members (such as the Office of Technology Assessment or the Administrative Conference of the United States), and centralized power in the leadership.  When he did not get his way with Clinton, he cavalierly shut down the government.  Not cowed by the political disaster that ensued, he used the House’s impeachment power for political purposes and put the House Oversight Committee in the hands of Dan Burton with the express mandate to harass and cripple political opponents.  Gingrich broke institutions not by accident, but on purpose."

  politics Gingrichism conservatism love-and-war

• A Strong Dollar Isn’t Always a Good Thing – Economic View – NYTimes.com

  "In practice, all that “the exchange rate is the purview of the Treasury” means is that no official other the Treasury secretary is supposed to talk about it (and even he isn’t supposed to say very much). That strikes me as a shame. Perhaps if government officials could talk about the exchange rate forthrightly, there would be more understanding of the issues and more rational policy discussions.

  Such discussions would start with some basic economics. The desire to trade with other countries or invest in them is what gives rise to the market for foreign exchange. You need euros to travel in Spain or to buy a German government bond, so you need a way to exchange currencies."

  economics financial-crisis public-policy worldviews disintermediation-targets

• Jeff Dean’s Ruby Blog – Form-backing objects for fun and profit

  "Form-backing objects, also known as Presenters (not to be confused with the concept of view presenters), are objects whose sole purpose is to take user-entered form data and perform some unit of work. Creating and testing form-backing objects is simple. In this situation, you might add a Registration object."

  Rails MVC design-patterns software-development refactoring tutorial

• The distribution of interestingness | (R news & tutorials)

  "The longer – and far less satisfying – answer to the question of how interestingness measures should be distributed is, “it depends,” as the following discussion illustrates."

  statistics interestingness design-of-measures statisticians-don't-do-Pragmatism-well learning-from-data

• [A BitTorrent combinatorics puzzle]

  "You have 40 bowls, all placed in a line at exact intervals of 1 meter. You also have 9 oranges. You wish to place all the oranges in the bowls, no more than one orange in each bowl, so that there are no three oranges A, B, and C such that the distance between A and B is equal to the distance between B and C. How many ways can you arrange the oranges in the bowls?."

  test-driven-development kata

• The Elephant in the Green Room

  "As Ailes struggled with what to do with Glenn Beck in a changed political landscape, an older problem reared its head. In February, news broke that former lawyers for Judith Regan, the former HarperCollins publisher, claimed in sworn statements that Regan taped conversations in which Ailes had allegedly told her to lie to investigators about her affair with Bernie Kerik to help Ailes’s friend Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. News Corp. issued a statement that quoted Regan denying she felt pressure, but it sparked a media frenzy for a couple of days. Regan blames Ailes for her negative press in the wake of her 2006 ouster from News Corp. and claims Ailes is trying to protect powerful interests. “Connect the dots,” she told me."

  politics propaganda Bushism television cultural-divergence

• [1105.3363] Active motion assisted by correlated stochastic torques

  "The stochastic dynamics of an active particle undergoing a constant speed and additionally driven by an overall fluctuating torque is investigated.…"

  to-read nanotechnology random-walks the-dance-of-life biophysics modeling

• The city gets a new lease of life « Future of Business

  "This is perhaps the most telling point about cities. Even in this age of technology – where people can collaborate with people they barely know on the other side of the globe thanks to the internet – success depends, as Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser points out in his book “The Triumph of the City”, on communities of individuals being in close physical proximity. Hence all the attention paid to encouraging clusters, whether they are in high-tech, as is the intention in the area around Hackney in east London, or anything else. Glaeser and others have plenty of evidence suggesting that future economic growth is dependent upon the ideas and initiatives originating in cities."

  city-planning workantile-exchange community communitarianism ex-post-facto-planning cool-cities