"we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots."
"Economists generally agree that one of the distinguishing factors between rich countries and poor ones is that it is much easier to start businesses in rich countries. In Ecuador, for example, it takes about 56 days and 13 separate procedures to get all the legal paperwork done to start a new business. In the United States, it’s an average of six days and six procedures. But if you want to open a mobile-food business in New York, it’s essentially like starting a business in Ecuador — and that’s if you can somehow arrange a permit."
— The Food-Truck Business Stinks - NYTimes.com (via noneck)
(via noneck)
Kowloon City, Hong Kong
This explodes into a very large graphic for more detail
See also: photos from Kowloon Walled City.
"We don’t make mayonnaise here."
— Sriracha hot sauce purveyor turns up the heat - latimes.com
"Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead, since no one is self-sufficient, we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. Average work hours declined for a century – and then started curving back upwards as the everyone switched the zero sum battle of sales and marketing. The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin."
— Great Problems: The Rent-seeking Economy | Intellectual Detox
English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron as the only legitimate child to the poet Lord Byron and better-known as Ada Lovelace, is commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer — a title she earned by writing the very first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine during her work on Charles Babbage’s seminal Analytical Engine, the early theoretical general-purpose computer that laid the foundation of modern computing.
Abandoned by her father when she was barely a few months old and half-orphaned by Lord Byron’s death when Ada was only eight, Lovelace was led to mathematics and logic by her mother, who saw these strictly rational disciplines as an antidote to the madness she feared Ada had inherited from her father. But even as Lovelace came to indulge her mathematical mind, she insisted on referring to herself as a “poetical scientist.”
Still in her twenties, she was enlisted by Babbage in translating Italian mathematician Louis Menebrea’s memoir of the Analytical Engine, originally published in French. It was in the elaborate notes on the book, which she penned during a nine-month period in 1842-1843, that Lovelace wrote the algorithm which staked out her corner of history.
Lovelace was in many ways a rebel of her era: Though she and her mother inhabited the upper echelons of London society, women’s participation in intellectual affairs was both uncommon and discouraged. Even among the gentlemen who pursued such disciplines as geology, astronomy, and botany, there were no professional scientists per se — in fact, the very word “scientist” didn’t exist until William Whewell coined it in 1836. And yet Lovelace, a woman, was very much a scientist — in addition to being the mother of three children — and an intellectual peer of Babbage’s.
But besides a pioneer of computer science, Lovelace, whose eclectic interests spanned from music to mesmerism, was also in a way one of the world’s first neuroscientists — at least a theoretical one. In 1844, she grew intensely interested in creating “a calculus of the nervous system,” confiding in her friend Woronzow Greig a desire to develop a mathematical model for consciousness that would explain how nerve signals give rise to thoughts and feelings in the brain. But, largely due to her mother’s instilled admonitions about Ada’s inherited capacity for madness, she eventually abandoned the quest.
Lovelace died of uterine cancer, after a short battle terribly managed by her physicians, two weeks short of her thirty-seventh birthday. She is commemorated with one of London’s famous blue plates, located at St. James’s Square and inscribed “Ada Countess of Lovelace 1815-1852 Pioneer of Computing lived here.” Her contribution to modern life is imprinted on every interaction we have with a machine on any given day.
Learn more: Wikipedia | The Bride of Science (2000 biography)
- NYC on-street bike lanes run one way, in the direction of traffic.
- Give trucks a wide berth. It doesn’t matter if it’s your right of way. Truck is to you as you are to ant.
- The cyclist climbing has the right of way over the cyclist descending.
- TAKE OFF YOUR HEADPHONES! You need your ears to…
Not sure why this came back up via Prismatic but worth resharing…
The Frightening Effects of the NYPD’s ‘Mapping Muslims’ Program
One of the program’s more damaging consequences, the report finds, was its effect on freedom of speech. Public talk of politics and foreign affairs, from the mosque to the barber shop (especially discussion involving the tactics of the city’s police department) has now long been and is still seen as an invitation for scrutiny. A father urged his son not to speak with the Associated Press as the investigation was breaking, for fear of backlash. A cafe owner in Bay Ridge stopped tuning his television to Al-Jazeera, in an effort to avoid NYPD scrutiny. (The tactic was duly noted in an NYPD report on Egyptian cafes [PDF].)
Read more. [Images: Reuters, AP]
“SECRET DEMOGRAPHICS UNIT”
Back when I worked at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, I used to get lunch from food trucks parked at a gas station at 59th St and 11th Avenue. Taxi drivers would refuel and take a break to eat lunch or dinner. So many of the drivers were devout Muslims that the station cleared out a large space between the air pump and the sidewalk for drivers to lay down their prayer rugs.
I got to know the guys at the food trucks and some of the drivers really well so I would sit with them on milk crates to eat lunch and talk about soccer or listen to their stories about driving cabs in New York City. Sometimes I’d troubleshoot their computer problems for them or explain bits of the Internet they didn’t understand.
Everybody was really nice and open and friendly and laughed a lot. When the September thing happened, everybody was upset and angry and sad for the same reason. We were all New Yorkers and how dare somebody do something like this to our town.
A couple of months later, unmarked police cars started appearing, parked across the street, watching. By the following Spring the unmarked Impalas seemed a permanent fixture.
Nobody prayed anymore. And nobody sat for lunch. Drivers would bring their food back to their cars and drive off when they were finished.
And that’s when I understood — no matter what the intention — how policies like this not only destroy Freedom of Speech but how they also destroy community.
"health care prices are high in America because, by law, we typically allow them to be high. When foreigners force prices to be lower, they get lower prices. When Americans force prices to be lower (via Medicare), we get lower prices. If we want lower prices through new legislation, the way to get them is to write laws mandating that the prices be lowered."
— Brill on health care: Steven Brill’s opus on hospital prices.
"When texts become cheap, context and subtext become relatively more valuable."
"Avoid a life of chasing prizes not worth winning."
"The MTA regional transportation network has assumed an aggressive storm-fighting posture"
“there’s a very good case that the redistribution of income away from labor to corporate profits is very likely a big factor. Here’s corporate profits as a share of GDP”: (via Corporate Hoarding and the Slow Recovery - NYTimes.com)
