Displaying data on graphs, pie charts and such is very common yet limited. The Internet has exposed us to many new, creative and interesting ways of displaying data. Smashing Magazine compiled some examples of data visualization in a very nice, categorized list.
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu
Let’s see you say that 3 times in a row. This is actually the longest name place in the world. It seems like a very beautiful place, as you can tell from the picture.
When I See Toilet Seats Twice A Day, I Must Report It
The old toilet seat “fight between the sexes” will probably always be a mystery to me. While I always return the seat to its previous position when I’m in someone else’s place, I wouldn’t mind lifting it and lowering it back as much as needed in my own home.
Having said that, it turns out that the issue is subject to actual research. Not much research, but who would have thought? And for those of you who really have a hard time doing the seat up-seat down thing, here’s the PeaceMaker Toilet Seat Lifter.
Inbox Zero – Merlin Mann’s Video
My email Inbox folder at work currently holds 181 items. Most of them are there because they need some kind of a follow-up, but I can’t deal with them right now or the action to be taken is in the future. Merlin Mann is a well known figure in the productivity and GTD (Getting Things Done) world (Merlin Mann’s website). Recently he gave a great talk at Google, called Inbox Zero, which is the name of his system for handling very large amounts of email.
After watching the video and taking action I now have 21 items in my Inbox folder. Soon to be zero.
Crazy CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (Wikipedia definition), is the de-facto standard of authenticating humans and telling them apart from machines on the Internet. However, some sites go way too far with CAPTCHAs, as these funny CAPTCHA examples show. (via Digg)
3D Mailbox Email Client – Good Or Bad?
3D Mailbox is an email client that visualizes the emails you get as people in a 3D environment. It is very hard to describe, so you can either read this Download Squad review of 3D Mailbox or see the 1 minute trailer (I didn’t get it until I read the review, though).
Download Squad, in a nice attempt to be impartial, interviewed the creator of 3D Mailbox, Robert Savage. It’s obvious from the interview that Mr. Savage believes his product is innovative and that outside-the-box-thinkers (and gamers) will sure like it. I guess only time will tell.
Funny Stuff That Makes YouTube Great
There has been a lot of talk about YouTube’s problem with protected (copyrighted) videos users upload to the site. However, YouTube has a lot of original content created by users. I believe that’s actually YouTube’s creators’ original intentions, but who knows.
One of these users calls himself Doctor Ashen. He creates his own original videos (all of his videos here), but I especially like his reviews of crappy electronics, both modern and oldies. Here are some examples:
- Barcode Battler
- MP4 Player
- Out Run Tabletop edition (do you remember Out Run? Great arcade game))
What Is SIG32 During a GDB Debug Session?
Sometimes, when debugging with GDB on Linux, the debugger may stop with the following notification:
Program received signal SIG32, Real-time event 32.
This may be a little confusing and mislead you to think something is wrong with the debugged program, as I have thought when I first saw this message.
However, this is not an error. glibc uses SIG32 to signal the cancellation of threads created using the pthread library. That’s why, if and when you need to do some operation with all signals in the system, you must start from the minimum defined by SIGRTMIN and not the real (kernel) minimum, __SIGRTMIN. SIGRTMIN is defined in /usr/include/signal.h.
To disable these notifications inside GDB, so that you won’t be bothered with thread cancellation again, type the following inside GDB:
handle SIG32 nostop
Complex Intersections Around The World (Including Israel)
I got this collection of complex intersections pictures and images by email before. Fortunately, someone put this on the Internet for us to see. Israel is in there, too :)
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
The movie Matrix was based on the idea that we all live in a simulated world while being physically located inside incubator-type containers during our entire lives. Now named The Simulation Argument, here’s a website that discusses a paper on the possibility that we actually live in a simulated world and the debate that follows that paper. The abstract itself lays down the very intriguing idea:
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a โposthumanโ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.