And you are here why?

The immortal Danny Trejo in " Your boyfriend is a douchebag "

The Guardian takes data regarding TdF drug-test from Cyclisme-Dopage , and charts it . The results are somewhat shocking - an average of 36%, with a high of 84% in 1997! . Seriously - 1 in 3   tested positive Ouch. Seriously - ouch .

Alexey Papulovskiy shows us how its done - collecting data from planefinder.net in October and charting it.   The results are remarkably cool - as the image above of the London regions shows. As he puts it Turns out, besides Flight Levels (FL) (which are indicated on my map by dots’ color: red ones stand for lower altitudes and blue — for higher) planes have pretty specific “roads” and “highways” as well as “intersections” and “junctions”. You can see this for yourself by taking a look at the Russian part of the map: it’s less “crowded”, so the picture is as clear as it gets. The sky above  Moscow area  looks particularly interesting: civil flights are allowed there only since March 2013 and only with an altitude of 27.000 ft or higher Go to the site for an interactive version - its worth the time

From Maps on the Web .

Planefinder.net , surely one of the cooler mashups out there.  I particularly like the way you can see flight patterns change during the day (e.g., in the middle of the night, there are no flights over India - contrast that w/ the US!)

Kieran Healy brings the pain to Monsters University  by applying a dose of Infrastructure Management to Pixar's latest A sample  Classroom spaces also seem poorly equipped to address the needs of nontraditional monsters, especially giant monsters. Disturbingly, the two giant monsters we see are both depicted playing sports: a female giant monster is shown playing giant ultimate frisbee (or possibly ultimate giant frisbee), and a giant slug monster is evidently the key player on the football team. And yet all of the classrooms are tiny, or accessible only by very small doors that even a moderately-sized undergraduate would have trouble fitting through. One has to wonder whether Monsters University recruits these talented young giant monsters for anything other than their athletic ability. But this pales with the conclusion, which is inexorably evident from Economics, viz. Two expelled former students have gone on not only to rise to a level of occupational success that...

Burr Settles , over at SlackPropogation , throws a mess of machine learning at the Geeks vs Nerds issue. As with most such things, it involves twitter ( Twitter - "Because you have too much time on your hands!" ), and Pointwise Mutual Information  (its basically a measure of association - positive means "closer", and negative means "further apart"). In this case, he looked at tweets that mentioned either "geek" or "nerd". The plot at the bottom (click to embiggen. a lot.) has the verification of his premise, viz. (and with all apologies to xkcd) geek  - An enthusiast of a particular topic or field. Geeks are “collection” oriented, gathering facts and mementos related to their subject of interest. They are obsessed with the newest, coolest, trendiest things that their subject has to offer. nerd  -   A studious intellectual, although again of a particular topic or field. Nerds are “achievement” oriented, and focus their effort...

From rmburnett's tumblr , we have this dispatch fro 2019, giving us the details on the JJ Abram's helmed remake of Godfather . Liked the original?  You'll love this! CODY JARRET SAYS JJ ABRAMS’ GODFATHER MIGHT JUST BE BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL!!!! ——— Cody Jarret here! I just got back from the hottest ticket in town, the top secret sneak preview of JJ Abrams’ new re-boot, Godfather, and man, did it ever blow my expectations out of the water! When I found out that he wasn’t a fan of the original, and preferred Scarface, I was worried, but I have to say, JJ’s done it again, folks. If all you want is a one sentence review, it’s this - Godfather is awesome! For those of you want more, here it comes, but be warned, SPOILERS ARE EVERYWHERE!!!!! We open on Michael (Zack Effron) in the army, blowing away some Nazis and shit. He’s a total badass, but kind of inexperienced, and rough around the edges. He comes home, and his family’s all happy to see him, cuz he’s a war hero now...

Via Don's Notes , we have this collection of NJ Cultural/Ethnic stereotypes in one map... (click to embiggen quite a bit)  

From Bostonography.com , we have this excellent near real-time take on bus speeds in Boston , based on GPS data.  Well, technically  speaking, its either GPS data from the past 3 hours, or the full 24 hours of data from the previous day. From the description This map is based only on the discrete location reports from buses, which occur at regular intervals. This means that speeds are calculated based on straight-line distances between those points, not on the actual distance traveled by the buses. In some areas, therefore, speed is a little underestimated because the bus followed actual crazy Boston streets, not that straight shortest-distance path. Note also that the speeds are overall averages that include stops, not solely moving speed. The below is just a screen-grab, go to the original for the live version .

@EUC2013

My cousin's first experience w/ Grappa The Inspection The Test The Review

Seriously, this has got to be the Job of dogs. OTOH the cat, wow...  AFAICT, its entire repertoire consists of "YO HEY HEY HEY YO I'M TALKING TO YOU LOOK AT ME YO HEY PAY ATTENTION HEY YO YO YO HEY HEY HEY LOOK AT ME ...."  (screen grab below, video above...)

XKCD recovers its mojo for one awesome strip ...

Today's column is - even by his own standards - quite the doozy.  Its basically an anti-Snowden diatribe, which can be summed up by the phrase " He's bad! He keeps hitting my fist with his head! " I'm really not going to bother fisking it - Ethan does a much better job here - but there was one section that made me throw up in my mouth.  Check it out He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more. Seriously? Seriously? Urgh. Don't read the column.  Don't read anything written by Mister Serious David Brooks. Just... Don't... And someone, please, please , tell him to STFU ...

From Joshua Katz's Dialect Survey Results - we have the following breakdown of Soda vs Pop vs Coke vs Other . Quite true, w/ the minor caveat that - AFAICT, in Chicago, they may call it Soda , but what they actually mean is Diet Coke .

The New Yorker does yeoman's work in this exceedingly straightforward yet highly informative interactive visualization. Mind you, per The Daily Meal's   (exceedingly unscientific?) poll of their readers, the Best Craft Beer In America  is   Dogfish Head from Delaware. Mind you, its not that Dogfish Head is bad, but I suspect there are any number of others that may be as good, or better ( Ommegang anyone?) (The below are screen grabs - go to the original for the interactive version ) Breweries per 50,000 people (Montana rivals Oregon? wtf?) Fastest growing breweries (Kentucky? Really?) Total Breweries (Mississippi, Alabama, and the Dakotas are waaaay behind)  

Brought to you by Jonathan Rosenberg and Scenes from A Multiverse

Pop Chart Labs puts together a ginormous wheel of cheeses - 66 of them to be precise - as shown below (click to embiggen. a lot) The poster version thereof is available .

via io9.com , (and possibly Massimo Pietrobon )we have this gorgeous map of Pangaea , w/ all the current countries mapped on to it. (Click to embiggen - a lot)

via greginak in the comments “If you think the difference between freedom and tyranny is free countries provide health insurance or direct health care for children of poor families, disabled people, politically powerful groups with cancer, Vets, and those over 65 and tyrannies extend those basic overages to everybody then you have lost all perspective.”   I can't imagine this being said better, thought this does get close “If you believe the difference between God-given freedom and evil, despotic tyranny lies somewhere between a 35% and a 37% marginal tax rate, you’ve lost all perspective.”

From Pop Chart Labs , we have the following awesome poster visualizing a whole passel of fruits (click to embiggen. a lot ). You can go buy it from them - high def, suitable for framing for the fruitophile....

You might have seen the recent wingnuttery involving working women (I won't link to it - if you really feel like it, google "Erickson Dominant Submissive".  And yeah, it does sound weird). In a wonderfully timed article, Bloomberg Businessweek article gets into the whole "Work/Life Balance" thing.  Go read the article, but the following chart sez. pretty much everything you need to know. about how our society has evolved..

Pendulums - a weight suspended from a pivot point - are easy.  You learn about them pretty early on in physics, and move on to other stuff pretty rapidly But a double pendulum - a pendulum with another pendulum attached to its end - well boy howdy, is it ever  something else! via Revolution Analytics , we have this awesome animated gif of a double pendulum in action - chaos personified. For more detail, go check out Wikipedia , which will tell you such fun stuff as [a double pendulum] is a simple   physical system   that exhibits rich   dynamic behavior   with a strong sensitivity to initial conditions. [1]   The motion of a double pendulum is governed by a set of coupled   ordinary differential equations . For certain   energies   its motion is   chaotic . and so on. Fun stuff! (the below is what you get when you stick LEDs on one of them...)