Wall Street Journal has some sensational data visualization
I don't know if you need an account to see the amazingly useful, elegant and well implemented bit of data visualization in the Wall Street Journal. Typical of a nerd like me, I focus more on the design and technical elements than the data that it is trying to show. The data, by the way is polling data sliced in all kinds of ways that are useful and easy to use. Well done WSJ!
Channukah is like the World Series, Christmas like the superbowl
Ned Batchelder, my pal, points out that:
"Like the Super Bowl, Christmas is one concentrated day. For celebrants, it is the only thing happening that day, and it's preceded by weeks of anticipation and preparation. Another similarity is the zeal with which businesses try to piggy-back on the excitement." (from Ned Batchelder's Blog)
He ends sweetly:
"While the daylight passes as it normally would, the evenings are spent specially, and the entire week is tinged with a special feeling because of it. If you have to miss one night for another reason, that's OK, you've got others you can celebrate." (from Ned Batchelder's Blog)
(yeah, you heard me, I called Ned sweet 🙂
Happy Hanukkah
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzh-TKzXN2k&w=560&h=315]
Squarespace: What’s a comment spam filter to you?
You may have noticed that this Blog is now hosted on SquareSpace. I've been pretty happy with it so far. While it is kind of a closed system, there are extensive customization features that allow me to get pretty much what I want.
And their support is 24×7 and very responsive. Although not necessarily always helpful. Note that I am not the first to observe this. Joannes Vermorel's Blog says:
"The feedback from the Squarespace support has always two properties:
- Extremely fast , my tickets are addressed within minutes.
- Extremely useless , canned answers constantly suggest trivial but vastly unsatisfying solutions." (from Joannes Vermorel's Blog)
But this post is about comment spam. One of the key requirements I had was that the new blog service would have comment spam filtering.
What is comment spam filtering? There are spammers out there that write a script that just runs through all your posts and write comments on them, with URLs pointing back to their site. It's a pretty standard way of manipulating search rankings and driving traffic to your site.
While SquareSpace insists, and seems to believe that they have comment spam filtering, it doesn 't work at all. I noticed by the way, that I am not the first to observe this. Joannes Vermorel's Blog also says:
"Yesterday for the 10th time or so, I have been sending a ticket to Squarespace - the company hosting this very blog - support to improve their abysmal spam filter (inexistent actually) for blog comments.
This is rather frustrating esperience to delete about 10 spam comments on a daily basis just because Squarespace can't manage to do things right in this area. Worse, people have been quitting Squarespace for years for this very reason - spam comment being the No1 reason quoted for the change." (from Joannes Vermorel's Blog)
Yes I could password protect or IP filter my comments. But if I want to allow people to easily add comments I open the door to comment spam.
As I write this I am manually deleting hundreds of identical comments, each from the same site, each with the same title and text. Clearly SquareSpace 's spam filter isn't doing its job eh?
Summer’s almost here
I noticed yesterday that sunset is now occurring at 4:12pm. The day before it was 4:11pm. So sunset is getting later! Summer is almost here, right?
p.s. Before some smart-alec points it out, yes I know that sunrise is still getting later so the number of daylight hours are still shrinking.
****It is left as an exercise to the reader to explain why the two events do not occur on the same day - in other words, sunset starts getting later several weeks before sunrise starts getting earlier. Note: the explanation is very complicated.
Super compelling: Narrative of human error leading to catastrophe
A remarkable article in Popular Mechanics (remember them?) about the crash of Air France 447. It was apparent clear case of human error and resulted in the death of 228 people. It is a compelling narrative.
"For more than two years, the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the mid-Atlantic in the early hours of June 1, 2009, remained one of aviation's great mysteries. How could a technologically state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? Read more: Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript - What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 - Popular Mechanics …
… We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots." (from Popular Mechanics)
Weight of tablets
I've been playing around with each of the major tablets while considering 'my next move' 🙂
Oddly I have not been able to find a side by side comparison of their weights. After googling for 3 minutes. So as a public service let me transcribe my notes on this vital topic.
- Apple iPad 2: 21.1 oz
- Barnes and Nobel Nook Color: 15.8 oz
- Amazon Kindle Fire: 14.6 oz
- Barnes and Nobel Nook Tablet: 14.1 oz
- Amazon Kindle Touch: 7.8 oz
- Amazon Kindle 4: 5.9 oz
Latest update on the art for my game
I continue to spend spare time on developing my Android tablet game. As you may remember from my last post, it involves a top view of a city. I've taken the time to learn a lot of Adobe Illustrator so I am used slightly more advanced techniques than last time.
I have to admit that when I walk around town I am constantly noticing the width of sidewalks, the color of streets, whether there is grass right up to the side of the building and other silly details.
Anyway, here is what I have so far. How do you like it?
Guy Kawasaki: What I learned from Steve Jobs
Interesting article by famous Guy Kawasaki about what he learned from Steve Jobs:
"But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I donat want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs." (from What I learned from Steve Jobs)
Kashi
Kashi is the new hot breakfast cereal. Wait, let me rephrase that: Kashi is a breakfast cereal that is getting very popular. It portrays an image of healthfulness and kind of a crunchy scrappy small company attitude. Turns out that they are just part of Kellogs Company. Oh Well!