And you are here why?

This, courtesy of the Emojitracker - a real-time view into Emoji usage on Teh Twitters The above is a screencap - go to the site for the real/interactive version

Check out the awesomeness from the Jiyugakuen Myonichikan auditorium in Tokyo. And, in case you are wondering why the Matryoshkas, there is a reason for that too.  The instrument they are playing is technically a Matryomin  - a single oscillator Theremin. Matryomin = Matryoshka + Theremin .  Get it? So yeah, its moved on from the domain of 50's scifi (which I love, FWIW) (The below is a screen-grab BTW. Video up top...)

You know the site that they found Richard III's body at? Well, they've been digging there, and they found another stone coffin.  When they opened it, they found another coffin inside made of lead . To quote Circa The 7-foot-long stone coffin was thought to have been sealed in the 13th or 14th century. After its opening, the lead inner coffin was moved to the University of Leicester for researchers to analyze how to access it without damaging the remains inside. Archaeologists believe the double coffin indicates a "high-status burial" and may be one of the monastery's founders, either Peter  Swynsfeld (died in 1272) or William of Nottingham (died in 1330). A third option could be Sir William de Moton of Peckleton, a 14th century knight. Seriously folks? Does no one ever go to movies? Do you know the first thing  that happens when you open the mysterious double coffin made of lead ?? If you're lucky, lucky  mind you, it'll only be the return of the...

Jim Lahey ( of Co ) is credited with popularizing "no knead bread" - in particular with this article in the NY Times . The following is Nicole's variation on the recipe, complete with some fairly helpful instructions (please to pay attention to the bit about OVEN MITTS!). Equipment Big bowl Big fork Plastic wrap or plate to cover big bowl Parchment paper Cast iron or enamel pot with lid Heavy oven mitts Ingredients 3 cups flour (1.5 cups all-purpose, 1.5 cups whole wheat) ¼ tsp yeast 2 tsp salt Ground pepper to taste 1 cup shredded pizza cheese (optional) 1-1/2 cups water Oil for the parchment paper and your hands     Instructions     Put all the ingredients except the water and oil in the big bowl and mix them up with the fork.  Get everything evenly distributed. Add the water, and mix with the fork until you have a ball of shaggy, lumpy dough. It should be moist enough that you don’t have crumbs of dry flour in the bottom of th...

Ever wondered what truly differentiates Lego, Meccano, etc.?   Stephen Wildish has the answer!

This chart of beard-length vs. magical powers comes to you via the ever inventive Stephen Wildish

This taxonomy of condiments comes from the fervid imaginations of Stephen Wildish

Via the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) , we have this interactive visualization showing Every (registered) refugee since 1960 The biggest countries of origin The biggest countries of asylum The years that resulted in the worst displacement and a whole bunch more. Its scary (and depressing) - check it out...

KickDex plots all the goals and assists in the Premier League over the last three years , and look what they found! The Goals - shown above, are really, really  obvious - most (!) of them are between the penalty spot and the goal.  Again, pretty obvious, no? But the assists?  Ah, now we're talking. As KickDex puts it It is clear that to rack up the assists, a direct style isn’t the way to go. Only 14% of all assists come from long balls, and 29% from crosses (many of which are also classified as long balls). Over two thirds of all assists are short, precision passes made from just in front of the box and wide within the box.  Mind you, this excludes corners (which, I suspect, would be kinda dark blue :-)

Ramnath Vaidyanathan does some heroic lifting with R based on the CityBikes API to provide a real-time view of bike-share availability worldwide.  As he puts it A couple of months ago I had posted an interesting application of using rCharts and Shiny to visualize the CitiBike system in NYC. I had always wanted to write a tutorial about its inner workings, so that it would be useful to others looking to build similar visualizations, and I finally got around to doing it. Along the way, I managed to extend the visualization to around 100 bike sharing systems across the world. The final application can be viewed  here . The below are just screen grabs from the app for New York, and London.   Go to the site to actually mess around ...

mapFodder has warped London to make it conform to the tube map, and the results are remarkably cool.  Its not just the skewed perspectives in the periphery, check out how remarkably straight (and non-twisty! ) the Thames is... And, of course, check out the video below to see the warping in action...

via The Guardian , we have a fairly straightforward visualization of the number of McDonald's worldwide .  The occasion? Vietnam now has a McDonald's - clearly a cause for celebration and arteriosclerosis! Learn About Tableau

via supercali-live Incidentally, in case you don't get the reference, Richard Cohen (who, by the way, is  an Idiot) wrote the quintessentially coded screed defending racist profiling . Coate's response  was spot on, when he pointed out that With that said, we should take a moment to appreciate the import of Cohen's words. They hold that neither I, nor my twelve year old son, nor any of my nephews, nor any of my male family members deserve to be judged as individuals by the state. Instead we must be seen as members of a class more inclined to criminality. It does not matter that the vast, vast majority of black men commit no violent crime at all. Cohen argues that that majority should unduly bear the burden of police invasion, because of a minority who happens to live among us. Richard Cohen concedes that this is a violation, but it is one he believes black people, for the good of their country, must learn to live with. Effectively he is arguing for a kind of racis...

The Guardian has a set of comprehensive and interactive visualizations of CO ²  emissions by country .  As they put it Interactive map of carbon dioxide emissions over time, including emissions per capita, per GDP, and percentage change year on year. Data courtesy of  WRI . Asterisks indicate no data for that time point, minus symbols inside circles indicate a negative number. To change from total emissions to other measures, select a measurement and set it to size or colour. All measurements are excluding land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). Take a gander at these, or go see the original ...

Erlang documentation always makes sense ex post facto .  Rarely, if ever, ex ante . Mind you, its a lot better than the usual lot ...

Tyson Gay (who recently ran the 2nd fastest 100 ever)  has - apparently - just tested positive for a banned substance, and is pulling out of the World Championships next month.   Per an AP story Gay wouldn't reveal the substance in a phone conversation from Amsterdam on Sunday, but he said he was notified by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency late last week that a sample came back positive from a May 16 out-of-competition test. He said he will have his "B" sample tested soon, possibly as early as this week. "I don't have a sabotage story. I don't have any lies. I don't have anything to say to make this seem like it was a mistake or it was on USADA's hands, someone playing games," said Gay, who fought back sobs as he spoke. "I don't have any of those stories. I basically put my trust in someone and I was let down." " I basically put my trust in someone and I was let down " Seriously? I mean, it is entirely possible that so...

The most awesome little squeak instead of the roar.  Brilliant!

This blog as a word-cloud, thanks to the power of  Tagxedo (thanks to a suggestion from Steve Vinoski )

Courtesy Thrillist , we have this awesome map of the highest profile beer/liquor companies in each state (by profile, not  by quality :-)  ) Click to embiggen - or go to the original to see it it in it's full glory

Great articled on Sealed Abstract on this . Go read the whole thing - its long (10K words!), but completely absolutely worth it. The conclusion is fairly straightforward (and depressing) So here’s what you should remember: Javascript is too slow for mobile app use in 2013 (e.g., for photo editing etc.).   It’s slower than native code by about 5 It’s comparable to IE8 It’s slower than x86 C/C++ by about 50 It’s slower than server-side Java/Ruby/Python/C# by a factor of about 10 if your program fits in 35MB, and it degrades exponentially from there The most viable path for it to get faster is by pushing the hardware to desktop-level performance.  This might be viable long-term, but it’s looking like a pretty long wait. The language itself doesn’t seem to be getting faster these days, and people who are working on it are saying that with the current language and APIs, it will never be as fast as native code Garbage collection is exponentially bad in a ...

via  @hq1aerosol

The Guardian (of course) has a pretty neat chart up comparing the political knowledge of men vs. women .  The results are pretty weird - fascinating, yet weird. Basically, regardless of the state of gender-equality in the country, women know less about politics than men. It doesn't matter whether its a developing country, a developed country, Asian, European, or American, its pretty much the same. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between increasing gender equality and greater gaps - Professor James Curran, Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre at the University of London, was surprised to find that gaps in political knowledge are wider in countries that have done the most to promote gender equality. These gender gaps in Norway, the UK and the US are as large, or larger than gaps in South Korea and Japan The most likely reason seems to be a male bias in media - Professor Hayashi concludes that the main reasons for  the gender gap in po...

Ok, only if your city is London, Paris, or Berlin, but still! This comes to you via WatchDogs , a game (not yet out) by UbiSoft , where, apparently, your character gets to control Chicago via some sort of centralized data-access mechanism. Anyhow, as a teaser, the folks at UbiSoft have created a 3-D interactive map of London, Paris, and Berlin, and you get to check it out. Its quite neat actually, go take a look ! (The above is just a screen-cap.   Go to the original ...)

From Fèorag NicBhrìde comes this map of Europe, or at least, a map of Europe based on how one sez. "Beer". Important stuff! hat-tip Nathan Yau

via The Reformed Broker   (click to embiggen) (I particularly love "Merkel's Workshop")

In comic form , by the ever-humorous SMBC

Last July, the Drillship Titanium Explorer was docked right across from our hotel  for a crew change, and as I mentioned before , it was huge . Well, this time around, there was another  drillship across from our hotel - the Noble Don Taylor   was in for a crew change too. It is slightly smaller, coming in at 752x118 feet (tiny, isn't it?), but it Looms pretty much exactly as much as the other one It is, interestingly enough, made by Hyundai - which successfully manages to invoke quite a bit of cognitive dissonance.  (The Hyundai Elantra vs. Hyundai Gusto P1000. Discuss...) Sadly, we got back from a (glorious!) day of diving at Rif St. Marie, and the ship had left. Never fear - MarineTraffic.com to the rescue (a blank map means its out of range...)--> (Yeah, theres someone to tracking everything )

When I was a kid, growing up in IIT-Kanpur, there were these fruits that we got locally.  We called them Ras Bhari , and they showed up with a little papery leaf 'wrapper' - kind of like a tomatillo. They were sweet, with just a hint of tartness, and were such a ubiquitous, yet seasonal, part of my childhood that I never even noticed missing them when I moved to the US. Nearly 30 years later, I'm wandering through a grocery store in Curacao, and spot a little container of what looks like either large orange berries, or small orange cherries. One "what the heck" later, its in the shopping cart, and eventually back at the hotel room, washed, and sampled. This may not have been a madeleine, but boy, was it ever a   Proustian moment! My childhood came rushing back, and I just sat there in silent bliss for the next few minutes, simultaneously remembering those carefree days, as well as wondering how on earth I could have forgotten these. Taste and smell - ...

Brought to you by the irrepressible SMBC

Remember CowParade ? Where different cities around the world decorated (casts of!) cows and scattered them all over? ( It all started in Chicago '99 - and we wuz there!) Meet a worthy successor - Gromit Unleashed  - a public art exhibition in which they decorate sculptures of the long-suffering Gromit . Mind you, this is restricted to Bristol (England. Not Connecticut), but its still one of the cooler things ever. You can check out the Flickr stream here ...

Nathan Yau @ FlowingData has charted the geographical distribution of grocery stores in the USA .  There is nothing particularly compelling for the residents of a given region, but for everyone else, its kinda fascinating to see how these stores are distributed (or, like Piggly-Wiggly, not  distributed) As Nathan puts it There's a grocery store just about everywhere you go in the United States, because, well, we gotta eat. They look similar in that they sell produce on one side, meat in the back, and snacks and soda on the side opposite the produce. Magazines and small candies are carefully situated at eye-level by the cash registers. There's usually a deli counter and prepared foods near the bread section. And yet, despite the generic format and layout, these stores can remind us of places and specific periods of our lives. When I was a kid, I'd go to Save Mart and you'd get hit with the aroma of cupcakes and fresh bread from the bakery right at the entrance. ...

Yup, its State Fair Season , and the greatest minds of our age are pondering that age old question What else can we deep-fry - and then put on a stick? The Minnesota State Fair (apparently the largest one in the country. Sucks to be you Nebraska ) has just put out its list of "New" stuff (and no, there is no " Fried Stick on a Stick" ), and they include what surely must be the worst thing since deep-fried butter , viz. Deep Fried Meatloaf. On a Stick Seriously. Its Meat Loaf. Which is then Deep Fried. And put on a stick. Sigh. We're doomed...

From today's Washington Post  we have what really, really  appears to be a troll but isn't (hint: Its Robert Samuelson). If I could, I would repeal the Internet. It is the technological marvel of the age, but it is not — as most people imagine — a symbol of progress. Just the opposite. We would be better off without it (as)  it brings with it a terrifying danger: cyberwar (and a whole crapload of "cyberwar--BAD" stuff deleted on count of terminal stupidity) Don't go read it. In fact, ideally, don't read anything by him.  Ever. The Stupidity - It Hurts !

Nelson Minar - at somebits - has put together a remarkably comprehensive set of vector tile maps of all the American Rivers.  Its based on the NHDPlus dataset , and a tutorial for putting it together and/or using it is available on Github here . The finished product is remarkably cool - check out one of the images below (click to embiggen. A lot )

Via the Guardian , we have this excellent take on flight delays in Australia , based on the raw data from BITRE . I'd like to see the same for the US - but suspect that I already know the answers (hint: anything involving the above airports). On a related note, heres the performance by airline...

Spiderman sales seem to be in a secular decline since the early 2000s - at least based on distributor data. Mind you, they both lose out to the X-Men, but then again, there seem to be a bajillion X-Men titles out there (and i'd claim, they all suck. but whatever...) The Guardian has put together this remarkably cool visualization allowing you to compare sales across a variety of superheroes.  Check out the embed below.. Learn About Tableau