I have a dopplr thing but maybe you don’t follow me there (you should!) so you wouldn’t know that I’ll be in San Francisco January 20-25 and New York February 15-22. San Francisco is a social thing with many of you. New York is a work thing but I plan on having a bit of fun while I’m there (I’ll be in midtown during the week, Brooklyn that weekend I hope). I like to eat good food, drink dark liquor, rock out to some live music, etc. (anyone wanna see Fela? Or the Tim Burton thing at Moma?)

Hit me on my burner if you’re down.

The engineers who designed the GPS system included these relativistic effects when they designed and deployed the system. For example, to counteract the General Relativistic effect once on orbit, they slowed down the ticking frequency of the atomic clocks before they were launched so that once they were in their proper orbit stations their clocks would appear to tick at the correct rate as compared to the reference atomic clocks at the GPS ground stations. Further, each GPS receiver has built into it a microcomputer that (among other things) performs the necessary relativistic calculations when determining the user’s location.

—Don’t ever say Einstein’s theory of relativity doesn’t have practical applications.

So says something called styleguidance. Heh.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

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Mark Zuckerberg seems to be saying that people don’t care about privacy any more, which is, of course, as stupid as it is false. Just because more and more people are using social networks and sharing details of their lives online doesn’t mean that they don’t have the expectation of privacy. And just because Zuckerberg’s little company handles people’s private information so poorly doesn’t mean it’s acceptable for such an influential company to abandon basic decency.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything by not having a personal Facebook account.

couch:

Eustace Emoji

The Netflix rental patterns map is a neat piece of dataviz from the NY Times

The lack of disparity between cities and even neighborhoods is pretty interesting to track.

curvedwhite:

I had friends on that Death Star.

This awfully designed device from RCA of all places sounds magical: it charges batteries by harvesting energy from WiFi signals. It doesn’t even need to be connected to the network to work! That’s crazy!

Even better, they’re planning on building the tech into mobile device batteries, which would, in theory, continually charge themselves. The future!

What Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses look like

The font was based on lettering from comic books Connare had in his office, specifically Watchmen (lettered by Dave Gibbons) and The Dark Knight Returns (lettered by John Costanza).

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No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

From the history of Comic Sans.