And you are here why?

Wulff & Morgenthaler are, as usual, awesome...

Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...

Ed Manley and James Chesire analyze tweets from NYC , and the results pretty much point out the polyglot nature of New York. From their description English (in grey above) is by far the most popular with Spanish (in blue above) taking the top spot amongst the other language groups.  Portuguese and Japanese take third and fourth respectively. Midtown Manhattan and JFK International Airport have, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most linguistically diverse tweets whilst specific languages shine through in places such as Brighton Beach (Russian), the Bronx (Spanish) and towards Newark (Portuguese). You can also spot international clusters on Liberty Island and Ellis Island and if you look carefully the tracks of ferry boats between them. Ed has written up some more in depth analysis of the   data here . Mind you, nobody seems to be tweeting in Kannada :-) (The below is an image - go here to see the interactive version )

Yup. That pretty much sums up our approach towards NASA. Actually, pretty much anything related to the gummint, come to think of it... (via Jon @ Scenes from a Multiverse )

Every wondered what the distribution of coffee shops in NYC looks like? Well, StatsBee does the heavy lifting so that you don't have to, and the results should surprise absolutely no-one that lives in NYC.  From the column In order to figure out where StatsBee readers could warm up, we used the latest Restaurant Inspection Results   from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. When our exhaustive search for caffeine was complete, StatsBee had compiled a list of 1,700 cafés, coffee shops, and tea shops in the five boroughs of New York City.  Manhattan neighborhoods have the highest density of cafés per ZIP code. The East Village ZIP code of 10003 has the highest number of shops with 49, closely followed by Midtown/Hell’s Kitchen (10019) with 47. Midtown East (10017) and SoHo (10012) each have 41, and Tribeca/Chinatown (10013) has 40. The non-Manhattan neighborhoods with the highest concentration of caffeine are Williamsburg (11211) with 31 shops, Glendale

Brought to you by the insane minds at Minion Factory (Yeah, they did the Star Trek ones too!)

Brought to you by the insane minds at MinionFactory

You knew that Lassie just wanted to do this... brought to you by Amazing Super Powers

Savage Chickens distills RomComs, and the essence is pure gold

The Economist does the heavy-lifting, visualizing your death-modes (well, at least some of them).  Turns out, you are more likely to die of a lightning strike than a dog-bit - good to know I guess :-) (Click to embiggen)

From CNN (Yes. CNN. Go figure.) Its simple, direct, and depressing.  Sigh. (Click to embiggen. A lot)

Neil Freeman at Fake Is The New Real takes on Electoral College Reform by redoing the state boundaries to make sure that they are all equi-populous (if that is a real word...)  From the post Advantages of this proposal Preserves the historic structure and function of the Electoral College. Ends the over-representation of small states and under-representation of large states in presidential voting and in the US Senate by eliminating small and large states. Political boundaries more closely follow economic patterns, since many states are more centered on one or two metro areas. Ends varying representation in the House. Currently, the population of House districts ranges from 528,000 to 924,000. After this reform, every House seat would represent districts of the same size. (Since the current size of the House isn't divisible by 50, the numbers of seats should be increased to 450 or 500.) States could be redistricted after each census - just like House seats are distrib

You've all heard of The London Whale , right?  The dude(s) at J.P. Morgan's Chief Investment Office in London who managed to lose $6 Billion on botched investments ? The gory details on what happened are out, and they are dry - seriously dry - reading.  But there is one part that stands out - the role of spreadsheets in all this. From FT Alphaville - [...] the model operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another[...] Yeah, you got that right.  Our Financial Overlords use Excel and copy/paste in their overlord-ian activites.  (We are so doomed) You pretty much know where this is leading, right? an operational error in the calculation of the relative changes ... [s]pecifically, after subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. Brilliant. Turns out that this was a ke

From C.R.U.D. comics .  ( Comics Regarding Unpopular Databases ) Money quote --> " Technology   must   remain compelling, lest it make us complacent ". Hat tip Alex Popescu

Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza nail one of life's essential truths. Mind you, they didn't quite grasp the intrinsic awesomeness that are Trader Joe's Chocolate-covered peanut-butter pretzels.

“The greatest triumph of the banking industry wasn’t ATMs or even depositing a check via the camera of your mobile phone. It was convincing Treasury and Justice Department officials that prosecuting bankers for their crimes would destabilize the global economy.” -Barry Ritholtz Source The Daily Beast

Will someone please make him stop? Do you think he might just go away if we ignore him? Or maybe we can pay him to leave? I've said this before , but its worth repeating - the dude just uses  pretty damn much any random factoid that he encounters, whether true or false, as ballast for whatever bullshit point he is trying to make. All the time. Every time. Exhibit A - his latest column , where he is trying to draw some sort of equivalence between India, China, and Egypt. He could have gone with a Standard Freidmanism ™ something like " The shared history of these countries dates back to the river-valley civilizations 25,000 years ago " or some such bullshit. But nooo, he goes one better, and basically makes something up out of whole cloth ( emphasis mine) India has a weak central government but a really strong civil society, bubbling with elections and associations at every level. China has a muscular central government but a weak civil society, yet one