It was great to see Michael Kirk and his friend who joined in the festivities. Though Michael forgot his laptop, we talked about how his site was doing post IndieWebCamp and I demo’d some of the recent reading workflow I’ve worked through in the past several months. Sadly I forgot the official photo of the group.
Chris Aldrich in his natural habitat (with pastries nearby). Hearing Tantek’s voice in my head, I went back after we wrapped up so I didn’t have to illustrate another one.
The quirkiest place I’ve ever voted. Glad they offered to be a polling place.
There’s only one thing on the ballot today: County Measure H – Los Angeles County Plan to Prevent and Combat Homelessness
Walking up to my new polling place, the American flag is blowing softly in the breeze.
You have to love the way the interior decorator has highlighted the tchotchkes with the lovely floral print wall paper, the couch, and the throw pillows. The restraint in not doing a floral print on the couch was superb!
I know who’s big into celebrating St. Patrick’s Day!
Directed by Chris Renaud, Yarrow Cheney. With Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart, Lake Bell. The quiet life of a terrier named Max is upended when his owner takes in Duke, a stray whom Max instantly dislikes.
Highly entertaining first act with some great comedey, but then not quite as funny or interesting through the “search” portion of the movie. The ending was just okay and sadly all-too-predictable.
Duke’s revealed backstory didn’t seem to fit with his attitude at the beginning of the movie. Why wasn’t he sad then about the loss of his owner as he tried to fit into his new surroundings? Louis CK was brilliant casting for this.
Streamed to television in high def from Google Play as a rental for $0.99.
An endless world map: Viewing the world through "Authagraph"
"Mr. Narukawa is the inventor of Authagraph, a world map designed to fit the world into a rectangle while almost perfectly maintaining the continents' relative size. It is mathematically impossible to precisely project the earth's sphere onto a rectangle. As such, previous methods would succeed in either taking on a rectangular shape or being true to the size ratio and shape of each continent, but never in both. Authagraph is groundbreaking in that it takes on both of those qualities, making it applicable to various themes such as sea routes, geology, meteorology and world history in ways never thought possible.
Instead of abstracting the globe into a cylinder, then a plane, as the more common Mercator projection map does, the AuthaGraph turns the Earth into a tetrahedron, which then unfolds in any number of ways. The map can then be tessellated similar to the way that we can traverse the planet–without ever coming to an end.
Rather than having just one focal point—the North Atlantic in Mercator’s case—nearly any place around the Earth can be at the center. The effect also means that the relative sizes of countries and their locations are much more representative than prior maps.
Alas, this seemed like it was finally going to go somewhere, but it quickly ran out of runway to have a satisfying ending as a standalone novel. Admittedly it is part of a multi-part series (three perhaps?) but it could have had a more satisfying ending by itself.
Ruby’s motivations were all too self-centered and she didn’t take the logical steps at any point in the book even when they were given to her on a platter, which makes it seem a bit too stilted. This is sad because the author creates an interesting world, has some generally interesting characters, and a wonderful way with words.
I’m torn thinking about whether to continue on in the series or just stopping here. Perhaps if I can get e-book copies of the next two once the third is released in November later this year I may continue.
A country's mix of products predicts its subsequent pattern of diversification and economic growth. But does this product mix also predict income inequality? Here we combine methods from econometrics, network science, and economic complexity to show that countries exporting complex products (as measured by the Economic Complexity Index) have lower levels of income inequality than countries exporting simpler products. Using multivariate regression analysis, we show that economic complexity is a significant and negative predictor of income inequality and that this relationship is robust to controlling for aggregate measures of income, institutions, export concentration, and human capital. Moreover, we introduce a measure that associates a product to a level of income inequality equal to the average GINI of the countries exporting that product (weighted by the share the product represents in that country's export basket). We use this measure together with the network of related products (or product space) to illustrate how the development of new products is associated with changes in income inequality. These findings show that economic complexity captures information about an economy's level of development that is relevant to the ways an economy generates and distributes its income. Moreover, these findings suggest that a country's productive structure may limit its range of income inequality. Finally, we make our results available through an online resource that allows for its users to visualize the structural transformation of over 150 countries and their associated changes in income inequality between 1963 and 2008.
