Anyone out there sick of the degrading, moronic, sexually drenched music of today’s popular artists? Music that talks about materialism and shallow relationships like they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread? You’re not alone: Alanis Morissette has crafted a parody of a certain song by the Black Eyed Peas that epitomizes the problem. She’s called it “My Humps” – enjoy.
Month: April 2007
This One’s For Darcy
Darcy’s in the midst of enjoying the wonders of buying and selling real estate right now. With that in mind, here’s a great example of how data represenation changes how useful data presentations can be.
Here’s a typical graph of the sale prices for houses in the U.S.
Here’s another way of looking at it – like a rollercoaster track.
Data visualization is an interesting topic – presenting simple data in different manners allows different trends and aspects to be highlighted and exposed. This is just a fun example. Another good example would be Minard’s map of the advance of Napolean’s Grande Armée into Russia in 1812.
And here’s a project from IBM called “Many Eyes” that allows people to upload their data and and share different visualizations with others. Now how cool is that!
Welcome Back to Traffic
We’re back from our trip to Cuba, and the first post I have to make is all about commuting traffic headaches.
It’s not nearly as bad as it could be. So there you go.
On an even more positive note, my fellow carpooler directed me to a great BC Provincial resource that finally opens up their traffic cams all over the place to the public. This includes a few of the pain points in the Lower Mainland as well as border traffic cams. There are cameras outside of the the Lower Mainland too, but I can’t vouche for how useful they are.
A GAP Analysis – Without The Annoying Commercials
Ars technica recently had an interesting look at how the US government may have been “influencing” the reports on climate change in recent years.
And on that note, theBside will go quiet until at least April 18th to observe the solemn occasion of a work-free holiday. Adios!
Daylight Saving/Squander Time
Arstechnica summarizes the energy-savings impact of the recent changes to the daylight savings schedule in a nice short article.
Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: “We haven’t seen any measurable impact.” New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: “no impact” on their business.
Ah bureacracy – where would we be without it?
Now how much time and money can the government spend figuring out if they should go back to the way it used to be?
April Fools!
Ah, gratification. There is nothing sweeter than seeing the concerned emails pop up in my Inbox from friends who visited theBside on or around April 1st this year. They were greeted with a simple page claiming that the owner of this site (that would be me) was under investigation for piracy by the CRIA. Here’s the fake page cooked up.
So to those of you who bit – GOTCHA!