And it hasn’t lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.
— Paul Graham, in a footnote to Hackers and Painters, published in 2004 2 weeks ago.
Whenever people say that something is ‘half the battle’ it’s usually less than half. Maybe even closer to 1/4 of the battle.
2 weeks ago.![Flickr Shapetiles is a slippy map of all the shapefiles that were generated from geotagged Flickr photos.
Every geotagged photo on Flickr has up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs associated with it. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to continents.
If all the location data for a given WOE ID were plotted on a map could you generate a mostly accurate shape of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out you can!
[…]
Or put another way: I’d like to generate tiles where the dots expand and contract as you zoom in and out. I’d like to generate map tiles that give you that same dizzy feeling you get when you look down at a city at night, from an airplane. In some ways I don’t even care about the street level tiles. I do but we’ve spent so long fussing over the relentless details in cartography that we’ve sort of forgotten what things (should) look like at a distance.
Flickr Shapetiles — a thing made by Aaron Straup Cope
This is really amazing - I love it.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l5ip8xabFE1qz6rq7o1_500.png)
Flickr Shapetiles is a slippy map of all the shapefiles that were generated from geotagged Flickr photos.
Every geotagged photo on Flickr has up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs associated with it. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to continents.
If all the location data for a given WOE ID were plotted on a map could you generate a mostly accurate shape of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out you can!
[…]
Or put another way:
I’d like to generate tiles where the dots expand and contract as you zoom in and out. I’d like to generate map tiles that give you that same dizzy feeling you get when you look down at a city at night, from an airplane. In some ways I don’t even care about the street level tiles. I do but we’ve spent so long fussing over the relentless details in cartography that we’ve sort of forgotten what things (should) look like at a distance.
Flickr Shapetiles — a thing made by Aaron Straup Cope
This is really amazing - I love it.
2 weeks ago.2 weeks ago.Will Wright makes toys that make worlds | Video on TED.com
“But basically, the reason why I make toys like this is because I think if there’s one difference I could possibly make in the world, that I would choose to make, it’s that I would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking. Because I think most of the problems that our world is facing right now is the result of short-term thinking, and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50, 100 years, or 1,000 years out. And I think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics, you know, very long-term dynamics over the short term, and getting some sense of what we’re doing now, what it’s going to be like in 100 years, I think probably is the most effective thing I can be doing, probably, to help the world. And so that’s why I think, personally, that toys can change the world.”
So they can’t arrest you for not carrying your papers, but if you don’t have your papers, you can be detained. I guess that’s what’s known in Arizona as a ‘catch veinte dos.’
— Jon Stewart (via soupsoup) (via mikehudack) 2 weeks ago.
