An American self-portrait
Chris Jordan makes numbers look huge and frightening.
Image cropped from “Light Bulbs”
“[The image] depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.)”
Ditching is not a suicide
Yesterday an US Airways Airbus 320 (flight 1549) landed in the Hudson river after both its engines were hit by birds. What’s really stunning is that everyone onboard survived (150 passengers and 5 crew) — nearly a unique outcome in such situations. New York Times has a nice visualization of the incident, and Wikipedia gives more details.
I am really impressed by the perfection of all this. The flight’s captain, by the way, has an interesting background.
Image cropped from grego!’s photo at Flickr
How Porsche hacked the financial system
Here is a very well explained example of a short squeeze.
Via HN.
A year of OpenStreetMap edits
OpenStreetMap is a free world map that anyone can edit (like Wikipedia). The video below shows a year of people adding and editing roads and highways all over the world. Sometimes some country’s network lights up at once when a bulk of data is added.
via FlowingData
Markets in everything
If you haven’t already subscribed to Marginal Revolution, do so now and never miss a single “Markets in Everything” post. It’s just too awesome to ignore.
Some editions: Xmas, Customer service, China fact of the day, Boxing day and many more.
The authors (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok) are great blog writers — if you’re trying to make your blog interesting, you better learn from them. “Markets in Everything” series are just one way of keeping readers come back.
Business models of the new web: the economics of content, software and social networks
In my graduation paper, I take a look at current monetization strategies of various online properties like newspapers and social networks and explain in plain language (supported by previous studies and my own research), why these business models survived and not others »»»
No rights, only incentives
I’ve been arguing all the time that the rights your government gives you are worth nothing. Anyone is free to violate any of the rights given to you unless the punishment is not severe enough to prevent it. The punishment is the incentive and works only to the extent that it is sufficient and everyone is rational. There is, therefore, no warranty against others violating your rights »»»
