le grand content

we all love indexed (right?)

bit of visual representation to get things in perspective.

maths geeks

Thought This American Life #88 - Numbers merited a mention for touching on the possible psychology behind a desire for formalised representation, though just treating it as something 'unemotional' is kinda one-dimensional.

genre-mapping venn

almost forgot, I went along for one night of the trans musicales de rennes festival and it was pretty good times.

almost as excitingly, though, at 3 in the morning burger-time, is finding this (pdf) being used as table place-mats.

ASCII spy..... half a post

Y'know, happens sometimes, you've got some contraband data you want to sneak out and spread worldwide, but under the radar, as it were. More importantly, wouldn't it be nice if this could just... be presented nicely, too? Is that too much to ask? These things make such a difference... We all already know and love ASCII art (right?) but most generator-type programs just populate the field with a bunch of random characters. This, new from Vincent Chu on googleapps will encode the data file of your choice (albeit at present with size restrictions) into an image, for example: ....this would be a lot better in every way if I hadn't been foiled by blogspot's stylesheets of course overiding any I tried to put in (to make text really really small, to render the image) ....I haven't been able to think of a straightforward way to do this ....something to come back to, maybe. (there was a hidden encoded file and everything!)

Keith Tyson - History Paintings

On the 9th of December, Keith Tyson released 5000 'history paintings'. From word spread by The Guardian Art & Design blog, visitors to his website input their location (village, town or city name), and using this as input to an algorithm to randomly generate values corresponding to the spins of a roulette wheel produced a downloadable .pdf of the results.
Et voilà.

Equation of procrastination

ok, all the usual caveats about models, especially psychological ones, especially cognitive-psychological ones, but at the same time the beautiful thing of formalised representations of slightly abstract phenomena, which I think I'm in love with... this week: Temporal Motivation Theory

U=EV/ID

Desire to complete given task = (expectation of success * value of completion) / (immediacy of task * personal sensitivity to delay)

Telegraph article here, very slightly more in-depth take from Science Daily here... or, if you've really got something else you should totally be doing right now, presentation by Piers Steel (theory author) here (including suggestions for motivation control n' that).