Feb 2nd: Chrome continue to get better and better. Ilya Grigorik explains some of the optimizations going on under the hood in this chapter from an upcoming performance book. If you work on the web, it's a fascinating read.

Jan 18th: Jason Evanish writes an excellent 25 things to know when moving to San Francisco. It's pretty much spot-on.

Jan 4th: An interesting little piece on British environmentalist Mark Lynas, an early anti-GMO campaigner, who has come around after discovering science.

The Dutch

From the same guy who explained the difference between England, the United Kingdom and Britain, comes a video explaining the Netherlands. Or Holland, Or Whatever.

Buildy

Buildy seems like it might be fun, in a modern City Creator sort of way, but I haven't managed to create anything cool myself (here's my effort) and there's no good directory of player-created stuff. Have any of you been playing with it?

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.

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