notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Here’s a fun ngram: an OCR glitch that tracks the rise of Helvetica. books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c…

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) November 29, 2012

Edited slightly to go from 1940 to 2000, instead of the default 1800 to 2008.

toffeemilkshake:

PIN number analysis

The first two digits are the X axis; the second two, the Y axis. The colour scaling is logarithmic.

The diagonal is repeated digits. The strong vertical line is numbers starting 19; in other words, years. The author has a somewhat more readable summary at The Guardian, with some interesting points:

In America, a driver’s licence, which everyone carries in their wallet with their ATM card, contains birthday information providing a thief with both the lock and key in the same location. If you have difficulty remembering a pin and elect to use a birth date, at least use that of your spouse.

The Atlantic: Why Your Prius Will Bankrupt Our Highways:

In 2009, the highway commission finally released its report, which included projections on what would happen to the trust fund as cars’ average fuel economy rose.

In its “baseline forecast,” it assumed the average gas mileage for cars and light trucks would rise to 31 miles per gallon by 2035. In the “conservative forecast,”  the commission assumed average fuel efficiency would rise to 45 MPG. Adjusting their projections for inflation — shown via the lines in chartreuse — the commission found that the real value of the trust fund would eventually drop by as much as 40%.

The graph shows what the [Highway Trust Fund] would be worth — in green and blue — and how much money the fund would need to maintain its purchasing power in 2008 dollars.

Fuel economy and a reluctance to raise taxes mean that there’s no money to repair and extend US infrastructure.

A different visualisation of sin z, taken from Wolfram’s functions.wolfram.com site:

sin(z) in the complex z-plane near the real axis. Here the complex variable z is expressed as z=Re(z) + i Im(z) = x + i y. The red surface is the real part of sin(z). The blue, semitransparent surface is the imaginary part of sin(z). The pink tube is the function sin(x) along the real axis. Along the real axis, the real part of sin(z) is oscillating; going away from the real axis into the complex z-plane its absolute value is generically an exponentially increasing function.

theeconomist:

Daily chart: life beyond Earth. A new index scores planetary bodies on their suitability for life. Unsurprisingly, Earth tops the list, but Titan, a Saturnian moon, takes the second spot ahead of Mars.

Physics and compsci are almost level. Interestingly (to me, anyway) astronomy/astrophysics is a bit further towards a 50/50 split. (via Gender Composition of Academic Disciplines: PhDs in 2009 at Sociological Images)

There’s an interesting (if somewhat obvious) correlation between when web 2.0 sites really started taking off (circa 2005) and when broadband first surpassed dialup, then became nearly normal.

Still, only “66% of American adults have a home broadband connection in 2010”, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

BBC News asks Who have been the winners in the big freeze? The answer, apparently, includes “soup”. (via Chris)

New Scientist’s visualisation of the half a trillion tonnes of carbon equivalent that humans have put into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

The relative sizes of the output to date of the industrialised nations is shocking: for example, Canada, with a population of 6m, has put out as nearly as much as either India or Africa, each with populations of over a billion. Compare that to the dubious chart Techcrunch posted earlier this year.

Instant Expert: The Copenhagen climate change summit (full size image)

via homepage.mac.com: ”in one small space, it shows the time of Sunrise and Sunset across the entire world throughout all Latitudes throughout the entire year of this tilted planet”