Via xkcd:
Experimentalist Monotheism
Month: May 2011
Religion, Hemp, Milk, and Charts
More Links: 1. David Leonhardt on Religion, Income, and Education. But where are the Atheists? 2. An Interesting Video of the U.S. Government Supporting Hemp Crops During WWII. 3. A Love Story…In Milk. 4. Crazy Interactive Charts on All Kinds of Stuff.
Sloan Follies
Here are some clips from last week’s Sloan follies: Opening Dance: Alfred the Robot: Grading at Sloan, with a guest appearance from Simon Johnson: Action Learning: The European Story: The Koreans actually do this:
Some Reading
Here are a few articles and posts I found interesting: 1. Uh-Oh: Gold on the Cover of NYT Magazine? 2. Why Does Groupon Work? 3. Tyler Cowen asks how a “true economist” should react to today’s news about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest. Kid Dynamite’s response: “Dominique Strauss-Kahn Renders Economic Theory Moot.” 4. I like this economic dashboard. I’d love to see a company or website create something similar, and update it daily. 5. Breaking Bin Laden: Visualizing The Power of a Single Tweet
MIT C-Bonds!
MIT Issues Rare 100-Year Bond: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to market Wednesday with a $750 million taxable bond offering maturing in 100 years, according to people familiar with the deal. Bonds of that length are extremely rare, although universities–including Yale and Boston University–have issued so-called ‘century bonds’ in the past. With interest rates near all-time lows, ultra-long-term debt is a favorable option for issuers; and with risk premiums between 10-year and longer-dated debt narrowing, borrowers, especially AAA-rated ones like MIT, can fund themselves cheaply over extended periods. Pricing offered on the MIT deal as of its launch Wednesday was 1.30 percentage points over 30-year government bonds, according to the people familiar with it. That was lower than initial
Baseball History
From When the What:
Fog Harvesting
One of my classmates, Shreerang Chhatre, is doing some very impressive work researching methods to harvest fog in regions without reliable supplies of drinking water. From CNN: Let’s say you live in a really dry area and you don’t have much drinking water. Meanwhile, you wake up every morning to the sight of fog floating by. Instead of walking miles and miles to get water from a faraway river, what if you could just extract drinking water from those low-hanging clouds? That’s what a researcher at MIT is trying to make possible with new work to improve “fog harvesting,” the term for the process of getting water out of mist by using giant tarps made out of engineered materials. The art
Beer With Fusion
I started playing with Google’s new Fusion Tables application, and it’s surprisingly easy to make those colorful “heat map” charts you see in The Economist all the time. I made this chart showing annual beer consumption per capita by country. It’s nothing original, but why not: Units are in liters per year.
Freefalling
Via xkcd:
When the What?!
I just discovered ‘When the What?’, a blog that charts mostly useless timelines on graph paper using a black felt pen. It’s great. Creatures Capturing America’s Hearts: Important Internetty Stuff: History of Crime Fighters: