Monthly Archives: March 2010

9 posts

Poetry for Our Times

Rosemary Kirstein‘s THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT FACEBOOK: I Your farm does not exist. You puzzle me. II I was of three minds, Facebook, Twitter, and blog. But it was only one post, Like a blackbird Sitting in three trees at once. III Sixth grade lunch hour Cafeteria. Decibel level = 110. All my friends are talking at once, But not to me. (Continued) If you have not read Wallace Stevens, this will make the poem a bit clearer.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. Ada Lovelace, Notes on Menabrae’s Memoir on the Analytic Engine Cheers to Ada Lovelace, the original computer programmer!

Nature by Numbers

I have a few quibbles with the inferential leaps people make about the Fibonacci number, phi and related ideas (for instance, fudging examples), but I cannot argue with the quality of the following video — it is a stunning visualization of the the relationship between the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden ratio, the Golden Angle, Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations:

Bookmarks for March 12th through March 23rd

These are my links for March 12th through March 23rd: Stanford Large Network Data Sets – Like it says. Google Translate vs. the Humans – NYTimes.com – EVERYBODY has his own tale of terrible translation to tell — an incomprehensible restaurant menu in Croatia, a comically illiterate warning sign on a French beach. “Human-engineered” translation is just as inadequate in more important domains. In our courts and hospitals, in the military and security services, underpaid and overworked translators make muddles out of millions of vital interactions. Machine translation can certainly help in these cases. Its legendary bloopers are often no […]

Bookmarks for March 5th through March 12th

These are my links for March 5th through March 12th: R Videos – Online instructional videos for R. Flickr: Creative Commons – Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license. Welcome to Apache Hadoop! – The Apache Hadoop project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Hadoop includes these subprojects: * Hadoop Common: The common utilities that support the other Hadoop subprojects. * Avro: A data serialization system that provides dynamic integration with scripting languages. * Chukwa: A data collection […]