I’m back

Oh well, I just noticed that some people keep coming here even though I haven’t posted anything for years. Coincidentally, I’ve seen too much magic floating freely in the intertubes recently and I’ll be posting it some time soon. At first it may be a bit outdated, but you know, not everyone lives in the internet.

P. S. Sorry there are no comments yet, I’ll enable them as soon as the flames of laziness subside below the action threshold.

An American self-portrait

Chris Jordan makes numbers look huge and frightening.

Light bulbs (300K)

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.

Flight 1549 at Hudson river (150K)
Image cropped from grego!’s photo at Flickr

Videos »»»

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.

Falkirk wheel

Awesome engineering and design.

Falkirk wheel

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 »»»