These are my recent Pin​board​.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