insomniphilia
Roboto in Google Search results
I just started getting Google Search result pages using the Roboto font. Maybe I ought to give it a try…but…I hate it.
I installed the Stylebot extension for Chrome, and made a style that sets the font back to Helvetica.
View comments
Kolmogorov complexity is one of my favorite things (via xkcd: Kolmogorov Directions)
View comments
S.A.P. | SAN FRANCISCO, economist.com
My Starbucks name
S.A.P. doesn’t order a nonfat latte (easy on the foam) every morning. “Sam” usually does, though. I have a relatively popular male name: not ubiquitous, but familiar enough—in India. Stateside, Sam sounds vaguely…
Giving out a fake name! This is my life!
View comments
Click the link in the post to view points dance — grouped based on how numbers factor.
View comments
Alan Turing’s 60-year-old chess program takes on Garry Kasparov
theverge.comThe 100th anniversary of mathematician Alan Turing’s birth has been celebrated in a number of different ways, including a public chess match between legend Garry Kasparov and a program that Turing wrote over 60 years ago. The matc…
My undergraduate thesis was on game-playing algorithms, and Turing’s was a must-cite paper. It seems like he had incredible insight; he would have had so much fun with modern computers.
View comments
Love this. The camera takes a photo and sends it out to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Someone writes back with a description of the photo, and that’s what you get: a printed description of what you photographed, inside an ASCII art polaroid frame.
1 note View comments
3000 processor cores, running for over four months, exhaustively analysed all lines that follow after 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 and came to some extraordinary conclusions.
View comments
View comments
Apple is “a company of patterns”
I was just thinking about something John Gruber said, that “Apple is a company of patterns.” Gruber mentions this in the context of iPhone and OS X names, but it makes a lot of sense as a general statement. Apple is a company that hates to make promises — a company that delivers products when they’re ready, and doesn’t like to give indications of what’s coming up. So establishing patterns — not just promising patterns, but establishing them by example — is a strategy that allows Apple to maintain customer and investor confidence, while remaining tight-lipped about any specific plans (and their timing). Of course, Apple staying tight-lipped is part of the pattern: it means they don’t have to break any specific promises, but it also helps them deliver quality products when they’re ready, thereby strengthening their implicit promises.
Really, there are two sets of patterns for Apple. There are the specific ones, like the pattern of delivering updates to iPhone hardware and software about once a year; that lets consumers plan their purchases, and expect that their devices will stay relevant for several years. Then there are the general ones that Apple tries to cultivate — that they’re a company that delivers, consistently. I think Apple is careful about trying to establish both kinds of patterns, because, unlike many other tech companies (which can sell their stock and sell their products with more direct messaging), Apple’s interaction with customers and investors is built largely on these patterns.
View comments
Robot readable world: “an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye” via Timo Arnall.
View comments
Page 1 of 10
