Canonical

hackshaven:

3DS Max Okeanos Explorer Model:

Pretty colors not included.

isomorphismes:

via proofmathisbeautiful, buddhabrot

Yes. Math IS beautiful.

techieyuckyboy:

Wizards, Dragons, and Dinosaurs: Classic Textbooks in Computer Science

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) also known as the “Wizard Book” because of the wizard on the book cover. According to the book, creating programs to direct computer processes is like conjuring the spirits of the computer with spells.

Middle three images: The different editions of the “Dragon Book” of compiler design. From left, the “Green Dragon Book” - Principles of Compiler Design; the “Red Dragon Book” - Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, first edition; and the “Purple Dragon Book”, the second edition. Dragons are used in the covers to depict the complexity of creating compilers.

Bottom four images: The different editions of Operating System Concepts, known as the “Dinosaur Book”. Shown are the 5th to the latest 8th edition. Dinosaurs are used in the covers I think because dinosaurs, like operating systems, can grow very huge and slow. They also need to adapt and evolve, otherwise they may be forced to extinction. :p

Best of all are the tumblr names that posted this: ixthil and the original content creator: Techie Yuckie Boy.

WulffMorgenthaler.com – Daily strip 03.02.2012

I love how one is content and the other is grumpy

Me too.

lemurturtle:

posting because i have NEVER seen pirate netherlands XD!

I don’t think I’ve seen a pirate of The Netherlands either, as I think about it for awhile. Certainly not as manga, or is it animae? I forgot the term. The tags were nice, so I decided to reblog them too.

Look down, lower left!

On Twitter, I know a sort-of Netherlands pirate, well, he’s more of a PhD candidate than pirate, but he does remind me of the days when the Lowlands had the best Armada on the high seas.

According to Standard & Poor’s, and Case-Shiller too (their housing market research partner), U.S. housing market prices are down for the third straight month, based on data through November 2011. The complete PDF with details of the latest release, hot off the press as of today 31 January 2012, is now available on the Housing Views website.

For more details on the housing market, past and future, see the Housing Views website, on WordPress, not the corporate pay wall site. It includes Professor Shiller’s monthly updates about the U.S. housing market, and on going commentary from S&P economists. I like it. The charts and graphs gallery will no doubt be of interest to fans of well, charts and graphs.

U.S. Residential Mortgage Performance Index

Earlier this month, S&P and Case-Shiller reported that cumulative default fates, oops, I meant rates(!) are leveling off, but later-vintage loans still face a long road ahead.

via McGraw-Hill Companies (on tumblr):

Cumulative default rates among U.S. residential mortgage loans continued to level off in third-quarter 2011, furthering improvements that began at the start of the year. Loans that were originated in 2006 and 2007 still have the highest default rates, but performance within these two vintages has improved in recent months. Given myriad factors, however, it’s still too soon to accurately assess whether these trends will continue. Read more.

bitshare:

If you are one of the MegaUpload users that had files uploaded to the site before the federal indictment and shut down and have lost complete access to those files, there may be something you can do about it to get those files back.

Read More

Vafle at the cemetery by Suitcase Type Foundry on Flickr.

Could this be an application of Benford’s Law for detecting political bias or worse? Maybe.

The terms weren’t obvious to me at first, so let me explain what is meant by “odd pricing”. In stores in the U.S.A., and elsewhere (the study below used municipal tax data from Denmark), prices for goods and services marketed and sold to consumers are often priced with 9 endings, including decimals.

Here is a typical example, $89.99. It is an obvious but effective way of exploiting cognitive bias. People perceive the price as $80.00, or in the $80 to $89 dollar range. It would be more straightforward to simply price as $90. The same is especially true when there is a transition between orders of magnitude e.g. from three to four digits.

Doesn’t $998.99 seem more affordable than $1000?

From the concept of odd pricing, i.e., setting rightmost price digits below a whole number, this paper advances the political counterpart of odd taxation using a panel of Danish municipal taxes.

First, the distribution of tax decimals is non-uniform and resembles the distribution of price-endings data.

Second, nine-ending and other higher-end decimals are found to be over-represented which echoes odd pricing research. It suggests that incumbents take voters’ biases into account and apply odd taxes to minimize the political costs of taxation while maximizing revenue. Attention should be given to how policy digits are arranged to exploit voters’ cognitive biases.

- Asmus Leth Olsen, “The politics of digits: evidence of odd taxation (Abstract)”, Public Choice, Springer, June 2011

Preview DOI 10.1007/s11127-011-9807-x

hackedy:

hello.

This happened to me on Friday! From “Zombies-are-peoples”

Is there anything I can do about it, other than hitting the spam button over and over and over?

Screen Capture of New York City, original by Huertanix

reignofartonline:

Photographs of the Casa Mollino by Johannes Kersting

A few years ago Johannes Kersting visited the Casa Mollino in Turino, Italy and took pictures. His photographs were recently published in the magazine “Weltkunst” by the Zeit publishing house. The Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino is famous for his organic design with erotic influences. This year his work was celebrated in two retrospectives taking place in Vienna and Munich.

Hier ein Auszug aus dem Zeit Magazin von Oktober 2011:

For the German language version, click through to the post on Reign of Art tumblr.

Somehow, the confluence of disparate influences works well.

This is the URL of the photographer, Johannes Kersting: 

http://www.reignofart.com/Kuenstler/Johannes-Kersting:::3_10.html

I’ve never seen triple colon’s used in a URL. Seems valid, insofar as I could tell (page loads, URL can be shortened by bit.ly, no invalid URL errors generated by any of my social bookmarking services). Disregarding SEO, I wonder: Is there any reason why it wouldn’t be a good idea to use triple colon’s? I like the way it looks.

fred-wilson:

cool blog. this guy is drawing all the buildings in NYC.

via ALL THE BUILDINGS IN NEW YORK: Google Building NYC

Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, the over-the-counter derivatives market was not required to “clear” transactions. This changed with the signing of the new financial reform legislation, the Dodd–Frank Act on July 21, 2010. Going forward, most OTC derivatives will be cleared through a particular set of institutional arrangements: a regulated clearinghouse. This article provides an overview of how clearing works, the potential benefits of central clearing for OTC derivatives and the optimal clearing structure.

Economic Perspectives 4Q 2011

By Ed Nosal, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

usagov:

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently charged a man with trying to sell $500 billion worth of fake securities on social network LinkedIn.

• Be suspicious of unsolicited offers.
• The old rule about too good to be true still stands. Compare promised returns with well-known stock indexes. [Beware] of guaranteed returns.
• Tighten your privacy settings…. “Don’t you remember me from college?”
• Affinity fraud… preys on what you have in common, like ethnicity or religion.

If you’re a personal investor who [uses] the Internet, you may want to read these PDFs from the SEC on avoiding fraud and understanding your accounts.