These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Altaeros Energies Releases Demo Video of Their Flying Wind Turbine — Core77
“What you saw there was a scaled prototype, 35 feet in diameter. During the test run it arrived on-site in a dock attached to a trailer, then deployed, activated the turbine, and returned to the ground—all automatically. At its highest altitude of 350 feet, it successfully got the turbine to generate twice as much juice than it gets at tower height. We’d say Altaeros is one to watch.”
wind-power prototype engineering-design sustainability energyMore on DRM and ebooks — Charlie’s Diary
“There is a pervasive assumption that ebooks are disposable literature. But to the voracious readers, this is not the case. Currently it’s hard for many people to build up collections of books due to space constraints — nevertheless I know many SF fans (of the kind who read 50–150 books a year) who have turned their homes into libraries. They will be the tip of an iceberg once ebooks become mainstream; why discard an ebook when you can file it and come back to it in 10 years’ time and it takes up no space? For such people, filing and tagging their collections is a major issue. And so is portability. It’s true that if they own an iPad they can have an iBooks app full of books purchased from Apple, and a Kindle app full of books from Amazon, and a Nook app full of books from B&N. But those apps are, thanks to DRM, data silos — you can’t cross-check to see if you bought book 3 in a series from Apple and book 5 from Amazon without a lot of fiddling around.”
business-opportunity collecting nerds-as-camel-nose my-people vague-press- “I am not a type designer. This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”. A Google on the subject brought up little, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that perhaps the process of averaging, or interpolating, existing fonts might bring up interesting results. Luckily at this point I didn’t do any more web searching – instead I grabbed my laptop and came up with an initial idea for finding what the average of all my fonts might look like – by overlaying each letter at low opacity. The results can be seen in the below image.”
typography type-design typeface generative-art design graphic-design - “In short, it’s time for a resurrection of the crypto-anarchist / techno-libertarian / cypherpunk movement and it’s associated values, activities and aesthetic. Those of us who care about these issues can’t just lurk in the shadows and act like nothing is happening. It’s time to start telling people about public-key encryption, hosting key-signing parties, developing new technologies for bypassing Internet censorship, developing tools for bypassing State and Corporation controlled messaging channels, and taking a stand for freedom.”
cryptography nrrrrds cultural-assumptions cultural-dynamics diversity No, physicians don’t understand screening statistics | The Incidental Economist
“So basically,when it comes to saving lives, docs are three times more likely to recommend a screening test based on irrelevant data than they are to recommend it based on relevant data. I’m bracing myself for the hate mail, but this is part of the reason why I’m skeptical that just providing docs with more evidence will change the way they practice. Most docs just aren’t trained to understand this stuff.”
medical-culture healthcare statistics probability-theory planning
slides presentation library javascript simpleFancy HTML5 Slides with knitr and pandoc | Yihui Xie
“Karthik Ram gave an Introduction to R a couple of weeks ago, and I strongly recommend you to take a look at his cool HTML5 slides. I started trying HTML5 slides last year, and now it is difficult for me to go back to beamer, which I have used for a few years for my presenations. It is horrible to see beamer slides everywhere at academic conferences (especially the classic blue themes).”
slides presentation library javascript markdownAn algorithm is just an algorithm | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine
“Another illustration that knowledge comes not through blind adherence to methods, but human reflection.”
algorithms statistics storytelling i-need-the-name-for-thisCapturing dealer descriptions in our online catalog — Yale Law Library — Rare Books Blog
“Attractive and rare set of decrees concerning the functioning of the judiciary in the papal city of Bologna. These city statutes were promulgated by the Pope’s legate, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani (1554−1621). Despite the issuing authority, the constitutions (a word indicating legislation of the highest level) are entirely non-religious in content, relating to civil law justice in the city. They shed considerable light into how courts worked in Bologna. Included are instructions on cases involving poor people; rules for notaries; the keeping of registers; seizures of property; taking of suspects; payment of officers; expert witnesses; and the governing of appeals. Pages 192–198 comprise papal edicts on the salaries of Bolognese judges and notaries.” — Leo Cadogan Rare Books (Dec. 2011)
books catalog nanohistory librarians metadata