Simon Stevin

He was a 17th-century Flemish mathematician and engineer. Some interesting bits from the Wikipedia article:

His claims to fame are varied. His contemporaries were most struck by his invention of a so-called land yacht, a carriage with sails, of which a little model had been preserved in Scheveningen until 1802. The carriage itself had been lost long before. Around the year 1600 Stevin, with Prince Maurice of Orange and twenty-six others, made use of it on the beach between Scheveningen and Petten. The carriage was propelled solely by the force of wind, and acquired a speed which exceeded that of horses.

And

Stevin thought the Dutch language to be excellent for scientific writing, and he translated many of the mathematical terms to Dutch. As a result, Dutch is one of the few Western European languages that have a lot of mathematical terms that do not stem from Latin. This includes the very name Wiskunde (Mathematics).

Wikipedia in academic studies

A list of peer-reviewed papers and other academic literature with Wikipedia as the subject.

Related: Wikipedia in culture.

Art from remote sensing

Data for decision

[via TomC]
The video’s about how they did GIS in the punchcard era.

Sensity by Stanza
[via anne]

This artwork visualizes the dynamic data around my environment as an audio visual artwork. I set up a wireless sensor network around my house in London. I live nearby a railway line, a factory, some trees and a mobile phone mast. (This is using real data).

The city is made up of bits of data that change. This artwork captures this change to try to understand the underlying fabric of city space. The artwork monitors the environment for change and relays these changes via the sensors.

Terminus, the god
[via blackbeltjones]

In Roman religion, Terminus was the god who protected boundary markers; his name was the Latin word for such a marker.

Ancient writers believed that the worship of Terminus had been introduced to Rome during the reign of the first king Romulus (traditionally 753–717 BC) or his successor Numa (717–673 BC). Modern scholars have variously seen it as the survival of an early animistic reverence for the power inherent in the boundary marker, or as the Roman development of proto-Indo-European belief in a god concerned with the division of property.

Incidentally, Terminus was the first name for the settlement now known as Atlanta.

Torque Control
[via jbushnell]
“This is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.”

Homogenizing the internet, criminalizing ornamentation, writing to learn & two blogs

We start with two rants, a hundred years apart. The first is concerned that internet search results increasingly favor a more homogenous bunch of information sources; the second argues that it’s criminal to add ornamentation to useful things.

All hail the information triumvirate!

[via migurski]
For the third consecutive year, Nick Carr reproduces ten Google searches of ten general topics. In 2006 Wikipedia held the top spot in two of the ten searches; in 2007 Wikipedia held the top spot in eight of the ten searches; this year Wikipedia held the top spot in all ten. Carr worries about the homogenization of the internet:

in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

I agree with Michal:  ”Google is the only one that’s an actual problem: its methods are secret, its data is proprietary, and its goals explicitly commercial.”

Ornament and crime

[via rodcorp]
Written in 1908, this essay by Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues that “[t]he evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” and that because ornamentation often forces objects to go out of style it is a crime to waste resources adding ornamentation. The first few pages of the essay are available via Google Books.

Becoming writing, becoming writers

 [via mathemagenic]
I’ve recently finished reading a stack of articles about writing, particularly about writing literature reviews. They’ve helped immensely. The article linked here offers an idea of writing “as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics” and suggests “that writing should be included more intentionally in our research methods courses” (from abstract).

Designculture in brief

[via anne]
A new tumblelog, centering on “the cultures of design and the designs of culture.”

Sunday is for sounds

[via mtchl]
An mp3 blog. His top five albums of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
2. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
5. The Walkmen - You & Me