Category Archives: blurb

Links (& blurbs about them)

More maps

The New York times has a neat interactive campaign finance map. The candidates would do well to study the following informative maps too.

Maps of War has mostly silly FOX “news” style infographics, but History of Religion and Imperial History are both great.

You can map all sorts of indicators of globalization at Gapminder.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has a map of the arctic isotherm and treeline. Watch this real estate — it’ll be booming unless the next president (see first map) ratifies Kyoto and turns our ship of state around.

And CIO has a purty map of who owns the internet.

Touched and blown away

I will say that if you are impressed by the “touch features” in the iPhone, you’ll be blown away by what’s coming in Windows 7. –Hilton Locke

Sure, the touch features in Windows 7 may “blow away” the touch features in today’s iPhone (or even 2008’s iPhone). But keep in mind, Windows 7 is not officially due until 2010 and will likely be delayed until 2012 or later, going by Microsoft’s track record. And I doubt Windows 7’s touch features, or any other Windows 7 feature, for that matter, will “blow away” features that Apple’s shipping when Windows 7 does arrive.

Seeing what isn’t there in simple maps of complex things

First, there’s Eddie Jabour’s Kick Map, an underground (literally) redesign of the New York City subway map, which has been rejected by the MTA. Too bad MTA doesn’t understand that the simplicity of Kick Map makes it vastly easier to read and use.

And then there’s Animals on the Underground, a modern-day version of the constellations which sees animals in the London Tube instead of the sky. People will see patterns everywhere.

And Driving Orientation: A World Map, shows that although most people in the world drive on the right, and many countries are following suit (only Namibia has bucked the trend by recently switching to the left), there are still many border crossings where you might need to make a quick mental adjustment after you get your passport stamped.

I guess there’s something to be said for standardization.

An Incrediby Simple Theory of Everything?

Garret Lisi, A PHD physicist with no university affiliation, who allegedly spends most of his time surfing in Hawaii or snowboarding in Tahoe, has submitted a 31-page paper for preprint titled “An Incrediby Simple Theory of Everything.” (The poor guy’s webpage is down, but Google’s cache indicates that he’s a burner too.) The paper departs from string theory, the TOE du jour in theoretical physics, and it’s got physicists talking. The inimitable Lee Smolin calls it “one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” and the press is branding Lisi a new Einstein.

This brings up the usual brouhaha about the mainstream media picking up scientific papers before peer review, but this time it seems that the blame is on the press, not the scientist.

Sounds like an interesting guy, and I hope for his sake he’s right, because how on earth could he ever live it down if he’s not?

OS X native Win32 compatibility layer?

OSNews has collected some tidbits Wine developers discovered about OS X 10.5. Apple may be working on its own, new, OS-native Win32 compatibility layer, and keeping it quiet for now. Out-of-the-box support for running Windows apps would be a killer feature in OS X, and the prospect should certainly scare VMWare, Parallels, and Innotek’s VirtualBox. If it’s true, we probably won’t hear about it officially until Apple unveils a finished, polished product.

It’s almost pointless to mention the other company that should be scared by this prospect.

Update (2007-12-02): Looks like this was one of the rumors around WWDC 2007.