Posts from November 2012

Appropriate Gifting

Just in case any of you were desperately trying to figure out a gift to buy me in the next two weeks or so, I wouldn't say no to this Gin Advent Calendar. In fact, I'd be pretty happy about it.

Lego Trees

Does anyone know anything more about the amazing Lego Christmas tree at the Trafford Centre in Manchester. I've only come across a single tweet, saying it was made of 350,000 bricks. Pretty impressive.

US Election Maps

Mark Newman at the University of Michigan has put together some nice visualizations of voting patterns in the 2012 US presidential elections, scaled by number of electoral college votes, rather than by land area.

Nov 9th: If you're working with JSON on the command line, then I can highly recommend jq for simple data manipulation. It let's you mine into JSON data using an XPath-like query syntax and makes quick work of extracting the stuff you actually care about. The source is on the githubs.

Restoring the subway

There's a great little piece in New York Magazine about the restoration of the NYC subway after Hurricane Sandy. It echoes some of the things at the start of The World Without Us about the huge level of everyday maintenance required to keep the subway system from flooding completely.

Nov 5th: Added to the list of "Desk toys that will eventually poison you" comes this fun piece from ThinkGeek - A vial of Ferrofluid and some magnets so you can play with it. I bet i'd end up swallowing some within an hour. Oh, and then dying.

Nov 2nd: Clippy.js is a recreation of Microsoft Agent, better known in its default configuration as Clippy. I'd suggest a look though the source to see how it all works.

Nov 1st: From my ongoing series of "things that are interesting if you're already pretty interested in the London Underground", there's a nice blog cataloging 150 great things about the Underground. Up to 61 so far, so be sure to subscribe.