Tag Archives: mapping

Items of some interest:

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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

Items of some interest:

Posted on by

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

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

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

  • Nelson’s Weblog: tech /​ foss4g-​​2011-​​trip-​​report

    “…The rest of this post is a link dump of some of the peo­ple and things I saw at the con­fer­ence. I’m no “cura­tor,” just a typ­ist, sorry for the lack of organization.”

    geo software-​​development map­ping resources

  • main — katt83project

    col­lec­tion of scripts and other tools in sup­port of the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers workflow

    Distributed-​​Proofreaders script­ing toolkit

  • Presto Chango | Futil­ity Closet

    “It will be observed that this square when turned upside down is still magic.”

    mathematical-​​recreations amus­ing nudge-​​targets

  • Ruth Kinna on Guy Aldred | berfrois

    “Guy Aldred is an obscure but impor­tant fig­ure in the his­tory of social­ist thought. He some­times crops up in his­to­ries of British social­ism, syn­di­cal­ist and labour organ­i­sa­tion, but rarely in dis­cus­sions of social­ist the­ory. His uncom­pro­mis­ing com­mit­ment to activism per­haps explains this neglect: as Aldred him­self argued in a com­men­tary on British anar­chism, ide­olo­gies are too often shaped by the philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tions of edu­cated elites, leav­ing the thoughts of work­ing class auto­di­dacts who spend a life­time stand­ing on street cor­ners, pro­pa­gan­dis­ing, ignored. Per­haps, too, his evan­gel­i­cal roots make his work an acquired taste: Aldred writes with moral cer­tainty and con­vic­tion that leaves lit­tle room for debate. Most bio­graph­i­cal accounts sug­gest that he was not an easy man to get along with and though he did not lack organ­i­sa­tional skill, he found co-​​operation dif­fi­cult. The plea­sure he took in the pun of his name – ‘the man they all dread’ – was indica­tive of the prob­lem. Yet Aldred’s ideas are com­pelling and the judge­ments he made in his early life were con­sis­tently rev­o­lu­tion­ary, lib­er­tar­ian, anar­chis­tic and usu­ally good. Aldred cam­paigned against mar­riage and for birth con­trol in sup­port of women’s lib­er­a­tion before the First World War; he encour­aged con­sci­en­tious objec­tion in both world con­flicts and pub­li­cised the vin­dic­tive abuse that COs suf­fered for tak­ing their stance. In all his early writ­ings, he ele­vated the strug­gles of com­mon peo­ple – from reli­gious non-​​conformists to con­victs. Draw­ing on the reports of his com­rades, Ethel Mac­Don­ald (1909−1960) and Jane (Jenny) Patrick (1884−1971), he sup­ported the 1936 anar­chist rev­o­lu­tion in Spain [1] and until his later life, he con­sis­tently opposed the dog­ma­tism of ortho­dox Marx­ism, whether it was expressed in the the­o­ret­i­cal pieties of the Euro­pean social demo­c­ra­tic move­ment or, after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, in the cold, phys­i­cal bru­tal­ity of the Stal­in­ist regime. The pas­sion with which he advanced these causes cap­tures the spirit of an opti­mistic, utopian, roman­tic cur­rent of social­ism whose hopes and ideals, squeezed by social democ­racy on one side and state social­ism on the other, were ulti­mately dis­ap­pointed but which remain inspiring.”

    anar­chism his­tory biog­ra­phy social­ism