And you are here why?

WuMo (once WulffMorgenthaler) nail it with this . Mind you, whats almost as bad is when they're messing w/ the TSA...

From All That Is Interesting , we have this animated gif showing the growth of Walmart stores in the US To quote Started by Sam Walton in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas, Walmart now has over 8,500 stores in 15 countries. In the animation above, one can see how the store opened in 1962 has exploded to 3,898 Walmarts as of May 2012.

Ok, saying its #Visualized is a bit of a tautological statement - I mean, this is just a night shot. Then again, it isn't "just" a night-shot, it is one remarkably holy-shit of a night shot (From infinity-imagined - click to embiggen)

From the irrepresible SMBC comes this gem

From Non Sequitur - giggle-worthy humor...

Every Erlang project will, at some point, include a datetime_to_iso8601 function Corollary The function will probably get reimplemented at some point without anyone noticing.

John Nelson maps NOAAs data on Hurricane's since 1851 so that you don't have to.  The result? Awesome ... (click to embiggen massively, or better yet, go to the source )

The fine folks at Stamen Design are at it again, w/ a brilliant HTML5 version of their hurricane tracker , now visible on the Weather Channel . (You need to go their to see it, its not embeddable) As the Stamen folks put it The client is the   Weather Channel   (previous work for them   here ), and we're working directly with meteorologists to ensure that the representations meet their standards. It's in HTML5, so you can view it on an iPad. Which is good! We've made some improvements to the interaction that I never got to take care of in the previous version. The entire histogram (chart at the top) is an active thing you can roll over, for example; the previous version only popped the rollover when you were over the lines. The histogram and the map have a much tighter relationship now. If the whole hurricane path is visible on the map, you'll see the whole thing on the histogram, and visey versey. Conversely, if you change the map so that 1/2 the hurricane i

Expertise in one field does not imply expertise in all fields Corollary Expertise in one field does not imply expertise in any other field Miscellaneous Also called Condoleeza Rice Syndrome (She may may have been a tremendous success as the Provost of Stanford, but made for a lousy National Security Advisor) And yet, we make this mistake all the time.  Marital advice from the police ,  educational curricula from elected boards , Basketball players playing baseball , tax advice from Venture Capitalists , the list goes on... Addendum @caseyrosenthal points out that expertise may, however, be a necessary - but not sufficient! - condition...

From the genii at Stamen Design , we have these embeddable / usable watercolor maps As they put it “Reminiscent of hand drawn maps, Stamen’s new watercolor tiles apply area washes and organic edges over a paper texture to add warm pop to any map. We’ve added more Photoshop-style raster effects to TileStache to render OSM tiles like you’ve never seen them before.” There is a post on their blog here describing how these maps are generated - check it ou t... (The image below is not interactive...)

CREATE , UPDATE, and DELETE have the same number of characters. But not READ @danechkin points out that SELECT works. <-- Dunno that CSUD scans all that well tho' @nivertech sez. Crea-te Read-it Upda-te Dele-te” which might quite possibly be the winner

Vardi's law --> from Yosse Vardi

From AdamThinks , we have this brilliant parody of the iPhone rollout (video above - still image below)

Yes, its a " Water Cafe ", where you can "Blend your own water". God bless the 1%... (located at 295 East 10th Street) Update : They, sadly, no longer sell insanely expensive tap water - I guess even the 1% aren't that stupid.  Then again, they should probably move to Brooklyn?) Update2 : Aaaand, here we go.  The perfect parody - "Handcrafted Water" The Timmy Brothers – Water Makers from Paul Riccio on Vimeo .

Process is not the solution. Process is never the solution. It can, however, be the means to the solution. Do not, repeat, not , confuse the means and the end... Mind you, I have seen "Agile" and "Scrum" used most frequently to just mean "now you have more work to do..."

The best argument for using the Oxford Comma . Ever... (hat tip @bascule)

 I know, I know, it should have been Picture Perfect Parody of Paranoia Pics , but whatever. Anyhow, I present to you, an Above Average production featuring Olivia Munn (and her, um, Chestal Area...) (Video below, still image above...)

that is all

As Vulture puts it  We've devised a definitive, comprehensive matrix that plots Streep's shining moments in cinema, from her yappy, overbearing Jewish mother in Prime to the French lieutenant's woman in ... well, you know. And the result (hat-tip Flowing Data ) is below (click to embiggen)

From the Tubes of You... Whats not to like... (and for some more pictures)

Trucks in Brooklyn invariably involve food.  Santa Monica is, apparently, different...

From Jonas Boner , Jeff Dean , and Peter Norvig , we have this awesome gist showing latency numbers for different types of data access The numbers pretty much speak for themselves, and its always good to hammer home exactly how bad a disk access is. That said, an L1 cache-miss is a 14x hit! Wild... Heres the same data visualized (from ayshen )... (click to embiggen)

Eons ago, in the paleolithic era (2009) when R13 was fresh and new and neat and The Greatest Thing Ever ™ we ran into a little tiny problem.  Ok, it wasn't a little tiny problem, it was a great big honking problem, viz., Shit Stopped Working. ( The cry of "Elaborate Please"rings through the streets of New York ) Fine, fine. Y'see we run a VoIP service in the Cloud (yeah, yeah. don't snicker) - a fairly standard thing nowadays with phones, calling, users, GUIs, etc. The thing about phone services, is that people expect to be able to make phone calls. And most calls stopped going through.  Whats worse, most people couldn't log in to complain that their calls weren't going through, and most people couldn't call us to tell us that they couldn't call us, and so on and so forth. Notice the use of " most "? Its intentional.  Some of the calls - apparently random ones - worked, but by and large, it would take up to 3 minutes for your

LICD is running a great series on Curiosity. I've reproduced it below, but go see the original ! (click to embiggen)  

Seriously, from the Hollywood Reporter Sony Pictures Animation has closed a deal to acquire rights to the classic 1980s sitcom   ALF   and will develop the property into a hybrid CG/live action feature. Jordan Kerner , who produced SPA’s adaptation of 1980s Saturday morning cartoon staple   The Smurfs   and helped turn it into a hybrid blockbuster franchise, will produce the project with show creators   Tom Patchett,   a veteran of 1970s comedies, and puppeteer   Paul Fusco . Words fail me...

Kevin Porter does the heavy lifting, so that you don't need to... Sorkin, of course, is the heavy hitter behind West Wing Sports Night and a bunch-a movies (Social Network, Charlie Wilson's War, etc.)

NBC does 5K miles in 9 hours - NASA does 154 *million* miles in 14 minutes.   That is all... 

The Solow model says many things , but one of the highly observable ones is that the income levels of poor countries will tend to converge towards that of rich countries.  More to the point, it'll converge towards those rich countries with similar characteristics. The point? Ah. The point being that if the country that is going to eat your shirt ( China! Japan before that! Germany! etc.) is starting from a lower baseline than you, odds are that the closer it gets to you, the more it slows down. Or, to put it differently, you can't assume that a country is going to grow at 8% for the next 20 years just because a country grew at 8% for the last 20 years.  So yeah, 20 years from now, China isn't going to have flying cars and free ponies. Noah Smith has a pretty good take on this based on the question - What happened to Japan in 1991 ? As he puts it Basically, by 1990, Japan had caught up to the richest large nations in terms of per capita GDP. The only way for Jap

Guess when ECB head Draghi made his big speech? More importantly, guess how much substantive information there was in it?

Ever wondered what was the new what in 2005? From Feltron , we have the answer.  From the site The project documents every instance of the phrase “is the new” encountered from various sources in 2005. It is intended to map the iterations of a peculiarly common marketing and literary device.