The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
Andy Denzler does remarkable paintings in oil on canvas that looks like badly compressed JPEGs or stills from an old video tape. A fascinating crossover from digital to real.
There’s been much talk about the version control system git,
in great part thanks to github. At the office, we put almost everything
under version control (either explicit or implicit through Google docs).
It just makes sense when more people are working on the same files.
To make git work for us, we need it to work a little bit more like svn than it usually does.
Specifically we want a central, shared repository on a server to commit our individual changes to.
It turns out this is very easy to do:
Initialize a new repository on the server. This will create a bare repository (not a checkout)
shared between users of the same group. We added ourselves to a new developers group.
git init --bare --shared=group projectname.git
Make sure the group is correct so all developers have access. Replace $group with your group name.
chgrp -R $group projectname.git
After cloning the repository and making a few changes, pushing the changes to the shared repository:
git push origin master
This is only needed the first time. After that a git push is enough, as long as there is only one branch.
Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today.
Be sure to watch the video on the intricate proces.
The internet is a funny thing. The endless stream of pointless status updates and silly youtube videos makes us look rather stupid as a race. On the other hand, the enormity of it also reveals how the extraordinary happens all the time. It’s a matter of where you look.
It’s wonderful being reminded of the creativity we’re capable of. There are some truly remarkable things in this technology-focused collection.
The automated computer systems that trade stocks at high speed is a disaster waiting to happen. New York Times now has an article about how a 600 point drop of Dow Jones in minutes back in May was the result of these programs.
The mutual fund started a program at about 2:32 p.m. on May 6 to sell $4.1 billion of futures contracts, using a computer sell algorithm that over the next 20 minutes dumped 75,000 contracts onto the market, even automatically accelerating its selling as prices plunged.
Steve Yegge’s Whirlwind Language Tour from 2004 is one of the best posts on programming languages I’ve read in a while.
All of computing is based on abstractions. You build higher-level things on lower-level ones. You don’t try to build a city out of molecules. Trying to use too low-level an abstraction gets you into trouble.
Lovely piece by Frank Chimero on not noticing the wonders around us
Can horses type? Probably not. But, you know, that clip-clop sound that their hooves make sounds an awful lot like the clip-clop sound my fingers make when I’m writing. I like that sound: it denotes progress. I wish we would still ride horses, because then we could have a sound we associate with progress and getting closer to somewhere we want to be. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.
New Scientist reports that we might wrongly be classifying young and fully grown dinosaurs as separate species.
Paleontologists John Scanella and Horner propose that some dinosaurs underwent remarkable morphological changes during their growth and that we are confusing these differences between juvenile and adult with distinct species, specifically that
… Triceratops is merely the juvenile form of Torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic Torosaurus form
ScienceDaily has a similar story about the Pachycephalosaurus:
Many paleontologists now realize that the elaborate head ornaments of dinosaurs, from the huge bony shield and three horns of Triceratops to the coxcomb-like head gear of some hadrosaurs, were not for combat, but served the same purpose as feathers in birds: to distinguish between species and indicate sexual maturity.
“Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth,” Horner said, “which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care.”
Color cycling is an effect used widely in games of the 90s to create the illusion of animating backgrounds by changing only the colors used in a single image. The backgrounds for the classic LucasArts games are masterly done using color cycling.
Joe Huckaby has created an HTML5 implementation of color cycling using a few of Mark Ferrari’s fabulous images. Ah, the memories…
