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Showing posts from June, 2014

Cats at night

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Pretty much describes our cat, 'cept for the bit with the baseball bat   hat tip  +Benoit Chesneau  

Proper labeling of axes is *crucial*

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via @pascallisch

"Dancing in the Street" - Without the Music

and yes, its just about as ridiculous as the version with  the music

#Kitteh says enough!

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Mercator Maps are Bizarre - Reason #67

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via Drew Roos The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away. Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles. His solution - redo the Mercator, centered on wherever you want (e.g., where you live), and reduce the cutoff to make it somewhat mind-boggingly tall To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole. This is called an   oblique Mercator , and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the e

Your (cat's) bed

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via Rhymes with Orange

Too cool for school

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Special Snowflakes Suck, And Mightily At That

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What anybody in Ops/DevOps/HugOps will tell you right off the bat. via ASP And this pretty much sums it up - the more you get into Special Snowflake Syndrome , the more garbage data you have to deal with, and the less your ability to deal with the (eventual! for sure!) catastrophes...

Efficient Markets (not!)

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Yet Another Takedown (this time by SMBC )

Our Surveillance State

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via ASP (admit it - you've felt like this at least once or twice...)

Slinky dropped in Slow Motion

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per +Dave Taht , an excellent reason to use head-drop queues to fix #bufferbloat :-)

Ayn Rand Takedowns

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I know, I know. Its like shooting fish in a barrel.  But the Gods of Humor demand it! Hitchens on a roll Scalzi on Atlas Shrugged  ( " Objectivism: the spongy white bread at the Great Buffet of Human Ideas" ) That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as  Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs.  (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of  Atlas Shrugged  lies in the fact that it  is  nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that  people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain.  I’ll show you!  the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all!  And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because  the Google