OPTA's 110% is a football data visualisation competition.
The, first, winning entry:
More designs after the jumps.
Favorite all-time short story!
"Profession" is a 1957 novella by Isaac Asimov, about education, teaching, drive, vocation and creativity. It first appeared in the July 1957 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction".
A small fragment follows:
All over Earth, George knew, Olympics would be taking place and young men would be competing, matching their skills against one another in the fight for a place on a new world. There would be the holiday atmosphere, the excitement, the news reports, the self-contained recruiting agents from the worlds beyond space, the glory of victory or the consolations of defeat.
How much of fiction dealt with these motifs, how much of his own boyhood excitement lay in following the events of Olympics from year to year; how many of his own plans –
George Platen could not conceal the longing in his voice.
It was too much to suppress. He said, “Tomorrow’s the first of May. Olympics!”
And that led to his first quarrel with Omani and to Omani’s bitter enunciation of the exact name of the institution in which George found himself.
Omani gazed fixedly at George and said distinctly, “A House for the Feeble-minded.”
Full text after the 1st jump.
In the world of optical illusions, the terms ‘autokinetic illusion’ or ‘apparent motion’ are used to describe the convincing appearance of movement in a picture that the viewer knows to be static.
[...]
Useful "cheatsheets" (work aids) for those developing web sites. Including: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Colors, Fonts, Characters, PHP, MySQL, amongst others.
Arthur C. Clarke presents "The Colours Of Infinity", a docu from 1995 about fractals.
The name says pretty much all there is to know: many a quote (600+) directly from Sherlock Holmes' sleuthing adventures, all under one tome.
From an effort of Gerard Van der Leun.
"Extracted" from the analysis of many an attractive face, a model emerged that enables a quantitative attribution of "attractiveness" to any other face.
Depicted below, the modeled mask for female beauty (repose frontal).
More after the jumps.
isaac asimovknowledge is indivisible.
when people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier
for themselves to grow wise
in other directions as well.
on the other hand,
when they split up knowledge,
concentrate on their own field,
and scorn and ignore other fields,
they grow less wise
—even in their own field.
Patented in 1953 by Robert Keaton, it's an improved version from an earlier model (also patented in 1936).
Its name says it all: it allowed typing music notation in a mechanized (and with higher quality) way.
AKA, Lady in Red, illustrates (and is a product of) what Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber dubbed Low-Complexity Art. The image/form/pattern can be computed from a simple/short program, without being obvious to the beholder, and this, is surmised, has an effect in its perceived beauty.
In some way, relating (equating?) Occam's razor with/to beauty.
Opened in 2008, the Svalbard Vault (in full: Svalbard Global Seed Vault) is a Noah's Ark, of sorts, for plant life. The idea is to preserve, in safe and optimal conditions, for generations to come, the biological diversity we enjoy today (at least in the plant life domain). A proactive (and welcome) effort that aims to preempt any potential damage done by natural (or not so natural) catastrophes in the planet's seed banks.
omnis commoditas
sua fert
incommoda secum
[every convenience
brings its own inconveniences
along with it]
