Posts from — January 2011

Miss South Carolina must be interning in their graphics department:

(via media matters)

After seeing several links to it, I finally got around to taking a look at Foursquare’s 2010 year-end infographic. (Check it out if you haven’t already.)

I generally like data mining like this and infographics, but to be honest, I was actually surprised by how uninteresting this was. The map is cool, but it’s tough to get much out of it because the data isn’t scaled by population. Looking at the US, that map just looks like a population density map. Is foursquare more popular per capita in cities than towns? I’d imagine so, but there’s no way for me to see it here.

Why does the food check-in rate barely change between lunch and dinner? I can’t tell if that’s just timing noise or something meaningful. I’m surprised that the food check-in rate is never more than double the work check-in rate. I’m not sure what that implies, though.

I won’t list every part that I found uninteresting, but I will say that the one section that shows some promise is “gym checkins”. It shows which states have the highest number of gym check-ins as a percentage of total check-ins. It’s too bad they just left it there, though. How do gym check-ins vary with park check-ins? Does weather affect that ratio? How do gym check-ins rise and decline after Jan 1? How do gym check-ins relate to fast food check-ins?

There’s so much more you could do, too. Off the top of my head: Given a check-in history, you could model jet lag and watch how jet lag affects meal times as the traveler adjusts. Given a snow storm, you could watch how visits to restaurants go down and supermarkets go up.

Hopefully they’ll have something more interesting next year, as I’m still optimistic that there’s fascinating stuff in that data.

Gnarls Barkley – Going On

This song kept coming up on Pandora, and the more I heard it the more I liked it.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_R9fId_Rqo)

The video’s pretty cool, too.

I can’t say I’m surprised by any of this anymore:

Do you remember, back at the end of 2008, when Goldman Sachs switched its status from investment bank to commercial bank? This provided it with various benefits that allowed it to avoid imminent destruction, and as long as they were doing it, the Goldman partners decided to switch their fiscal year from one that starts on December 1 to one that starts on January 1. Because of that, December 2008 was part of no fiscal year at all, and Goldman cleverly booked huge losses that month that never showed up on any of its annual reports.

(there’s more…)

Goldman Sachs seems to have no shortage of contempt for just about everyone. (Hopefully that statement isn’t too anthropomorphic.)

No wonder all those horoscopes seemed like meaningless garbage for all these years!

Tonight I listened to Martin Luther King Jr’s 1967 speech “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”. King’s opposition to the Vietnam war was, as far as I recall, largely omitted when learning about him in school (reminding me of my earlier post about the Pentagon Papers and history education). The speech itself is rather plodding at first, but really picked up in the second half (it won the 1971 Grammy for Spoken Word).

This post won’t do any real analysis of the speech, I only hope to highlight certain passages that I found noteworthy. The parallels with the modern world will be self-explanatory to anyone who reads this blog.

On equating dissent with disloyalty:

Now, of course, one of the difficulties in speaking out today grows the fact that there are those who are seeking to equate dissent with disloyalty. It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or a traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.

On domestic vs. war investment:

And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

On non-violence and the press:

There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children”. There’s something wrong with that press!

On things and people:

I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

On economic imperialism and warfare:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

If you have time, the whole speech is worth a listen. Here’s the audio:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U)

Full speech text (differs somewhat from audio above, as I believe it’s from a different version of the speech)

In case you haven’t seen it already, this is quite hilarious: The Greatest Letter Ever Printed On NFL Team Letterhead.

(via kottke, I think, but I can’t find the link)

The National Post recently had a fascinating article about the practice of stoning in Iran. From the article:

Since 1980, at least 150 men and women have been stoned to death in Iran, said Farshad Hoseini, head of the International Committee against Execution, who has compiled a report on the practice from media reports and human rights organizations.

However, he cautions in the report, “It should be pointed out that obtaining a true and complete list of the victims is extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, due to the regime’s systematic censorship of such news.”

He added, “Stoning in Iran is a political tool in the hands of an Islamic regime to oppress the society as a whole in one of the most savage ways. The overwhelming majority of the victims of stoning are women. Stoning in Iran is therefore a tool, among many such religious, oppressive tools, for keeping women in their place.”

The illustrations in the accompanying infographic provide the brutal details. It’s really a shocking read. There’s something about the banal codification of the practice that is especially scary. With that said, I’m certainly not proud of the executions in the US, and people in glass houses shouldn’t, well, you know…

I’m headed to Tahoe with some friends.

Here’s a picture from the last time I went to Heavenly (taken at an altitude of about 10,000 ft, I think):

I can’t wait!

Igor passed along this song a while ago and I’ve been meaning to post it. Listen:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ9zeDd0mpg)

I know almost nothing about this song or the musicians, but I really enjoy it. Not knowing any French makes me appreciate this song in a completely different way from most music. I listened to some other performances of the same song, but haven’t enjoyed any of them as much as this.