roomthily

LiquiData

a multitouch application to explore your personal movement profile and to show other people engaging places by adding photos and comments with the help of your smartphone. It can be seen as a rating system that offers people the possibility to discover new spots in an unknown surrounding e.g. during a city-visit. Although a smartphone is not necessary to interact with the system, it offers you the possibility to give insights to your movements through the city and lets you compare your mental map with the reality.

mythologyofblue:

Image #1: Unidentified Photographer, [Plane vapor trails and mushroom cloud from atomic bomb test April 22, 1952, Yucca Flat, Nevada], April 21-22, 1952

Image #2: Wandering zero and other characteristics of siphon recorder signals anticipated by Dr. Sterne in his The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, here: volume V, chapter XL in a 1767 printing. Shewing the diagrammed “ins and outs” of his account as it moves toward a “tolerably straight line.” (via asfaltics) *

Image #3: Luc Dupin (via reliablememory)

algopop:

To track how languages evolve, words mutate, sounds shift, and new tongues arise from old, an algorithm has been developed to reconstruct lost languages using the sounds uttered by those who speak their modern successors.

Alexandre Bouchard-Côté at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues have developed a machine-learning algorithm that uses rules about how the sounds of words can vary to infer the most likely phonetic changes behind a language’s divergence. The system was also able to suggest how ancestor languages might have sounded and also identify which sounds were most likely to change. src

iamdanw:

“Someone figured out how to fool another algorithm into buying high and selling low. We’ve spotted this before and the regulators have stated that this is illegal.” (via Nanex ~ 12-Feb-2013 ~ Are Algos This Stupid (or is it a trap?))

it’s a trap?

homing pigeon tests, Cornell to Jersey Hill, 1968 - 1987

via The Atlantic

Acoustic shadow zones — also known as “zones of silence” — are a normal phenomenon: Sound waves bend up through the troposphere (the lower 10 km of the atmosphere), reach the stratosphere where the temperature gradient changes, and are bent back down. The space in between where the rays go up and where they come back down is mostly silent. This is why in big explosions, such as the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, people closer in often don’t hear anything, while those further out do. Released in a shadow zone, the Cornell pigeons were lost.

But why, then, on August 13, 1969, were they able to navigate so well? When Hagstrum modeled the atmospheric conditions from that date, he found an anomaly: Something — a wind shear or a temperature inversion at about a kilometer’s height — bent the sounds back down. “It bent it down early enough that it hit at Jersey Hill,” Hagstrum said.

No one on the ground would have ever noticed anything odd weather-wise.

neighbornet of folktale similarity (R. Ross, S. Greenhill, Q. Atkinson) - 

the closer the populations, the more similar their folktales tend to be; “box-like structures show the reticulate nature of folktale similarity, indicating extensive horizontal transmission (as opposed to vertical transmission down cultural lineages).”

via Sentence first

Grimm’s Fairy Tale Metrics

Remix of the Century — one long beat matched remix of all highest ranked songs we could find audio for

flickr images as geotagged word clouds (Alexander Dunkel)

via The Atlantic Cities