line - Dave's Blog

The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and turning Bob and Harvey Weinstein into giants. How did Quentin Tarantino, a high-school dropout and former video-store clerk, change the face of modern cinema? Mark Seal takes the director, his producers, and his cast back in time, to 1993.

theatlantic:

How the 8.5” x 11” Piece of Paper Got Its Size

Why do we use a paper size that is so unfriendly for the basic task of reading? According to a very interesting post by Paul Stanley, the rough dimensions of office paper evolved to accommodate handwriting and typewriters with monospaced fonts, both of which rendered many fewer characters per line. “Typewriters,” he explains, “produced 10 or 12 characters per inch: so on (say) 8.5 inch wide paper, with 1 inch margins, you had 6.5 inches of type, giving … around 65 to 78 characters.” This, he says, is “pretty close to ideal.”

Read more. [Image: Picsfive/Shutterstock]

The U.S. Census Bureau today released a new online service that makes key demographic, socio-economic and housing statistics more accessible than ever before. The Census Bureau’s first-ever public Application Programming Interface (API) allows developers to design Web and mobile apps to explore or learn more about America’s changing population and economy.

One persons quest to watch the Olympics online.

The location requirements (guessed at via IP address) are irritating. The requirement that you have a particular cable subscription to view video online seems like not network neutrality.

Also this related article:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/27/nbc-olympic-opening-ceremony/

enochliew:

Tetris Street Art by Gaffa gallery

Located in Sydney on Abercrombie Lane.

I’d get out of there before they form a horizontal line…

jQuery plugin that blindly removes lines with errors and recompiles until it works  

Ready Player One Easter Egg Hunt - Contest Announcement (by ernestcline)

Neat demo of Visvalingam’s line simplification algorithm in JavaScript applied to a map of the US.

To simplify geometry to suit the displayed resolution, various line simplification algorithms exist. While Douglas–Peucker is the most well-known, Visvalingam’s algorithm may be more effective and has a remarkably intuitive explanation: it progressively removes points with the least-perceptible change.

“From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.”

Answers those questions like “When will the Sun boil away the Earth’s oceans?” and “When will the Sun burn out?”, but brings up new questions like which supercontinent configuration will win? I’m hoping for Pangea Ultima as it has the best name.

“Both men bought tickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life on American Airlines. “

“He was airborne almost every other day. If a friend mentioned a new exhibit at the Louvre, Rothstein thought nothing of jetting from his Chicago home to San Francisco to pick her up and then fly to Paris together.”

“She pulled years of flight records for Rothstein and Vroom and calculated that each was costing American more than $1 million a year.”

denialtwister:

This line is as good as/better than the 
“Yes, I am serious and don’t called me shirley.” line thing. 

A House subcommittee has passed the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA), which would require disclosure from companies about their human rights practices and limit the export of technologies that “serve the primary purpose of” facilitating government surveillance or censorship to countries designated as “Internet-restricting.”

The Dancebulance - Gov Ball 2012 Lineup (by nathanjbarnatt)

Another Nathan Barnatt video with awesome music and dance moves.  Also enjoying the music video for third song in this video “Barbara Streisand” by Duck Sauce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu_zwdmz0hE

Astronaut endorses destroying the moon!

The best exchange on the IAmA:

Ghostshirts it’s been a dream for a long time now, do you think that we’ll actually be able to blow up the moon in our lifetime?

RonGaran I truly believe that we can accomplish anything we set our minds on. We only need the will to do it

Free Universal Construction Kit is a set of 3D models you can print on a 3D printer that allow you to connect Lego to Duplo to Lincoln Logs, etc.

Set of issues run into by children using iPad apps.  Should be generally appropriate though:

“Designing apps for children is extremely hard. Not only is quality, age-appropriate content hard to create, but designing the flow and interaction of these apps is made more difficult because designers must refrain from implementing advanced gestures, which would only confuse and frustrate kids (and, by extension, their parents). Yet all apps can and should adhere to certain basics. Hopefully, the four guidelines discussed here can become fixtures of all children’s apps.”