We can use billions of public Tweets to detect events and visualize the synchrony they generate at a large scale. Tweets about sunsets spike when there’s a sunset. We can use this pattern of Tweets to visualize how the time when the sun sets differs by season, as well as to compare how these lines …
Why Game Developers Should Care About HTML5
Slides (with notes) of a talk I gave at the SEGAN Conference in Tallinn, Estonia a few weeks ago. The talk consisted of two parts: the actual talk, and a demonstration. The talk was handled by me, the demonstration by my colleague Rogier. These slides are not available anymore. Please see this updated version of …
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Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?
A “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” alike answer to estimating how long software development will take. Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. The line is about 400 miles long; we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours …
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Bob Burnquist’s “Dreamland”
You’ve seen skateboarding videos, but you haven’t seen anything like Bob Burnquist’s Dreamland. One of the best skateboarders in the world, Burnquist built a skateboarding mega-ramp in his backyard in Southern California. Now, he released an 8:30-minute video in which he defies gravity with a variety of crazy tricks, some of them including a helicopter …
A Second a Day from Birth
Meet our son Indigo who was born on the 9th July 2012. From that day my wife and I videoed Indigo at least once a day, every day up to a year old. For his first birthday we’ve spent some time putting together a video of his entire first year. Recorded using the 1 Second …
3D Sound from ordinary laptop speakers
Edgar Choueiri, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, has developed a way to play true three-dimensional sound recordings over regular loudspeakers, such as those found in televisions and computer laptops. The filter is designed to work with loudspeakers – not headphones – and can be experienced through standard computer speakers. (Make …
Shuttle
A Month of Citi Bike
It’s been nearly two months since New York City rolled out its bike-sharing program. To see how it’s faring, we used live data, provided by Citi Bike, to map where people rode for one month. As the month progresses, the circles on the map grow or shrink according to the number of available bikes at …
Life of a Stranger Who Stole my Phone
LeapJS – JavaScript client(s) for the Leap Motion Controller
My Leap Motion Controller arrived last week. It’s quite fun to play around with, yet not recommended for every day use (this review by The Verge sums it all up quite nicely). Above that the daemon eats away CPU cycles as if it were candy 🙁 One very cool aspect about the Leap Motion though …
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