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).

The Cult of Done Manifesto

In a week in which I’ve all but settled on a dissertation topic, it helps to see celebrations of the rough draft; I expect my couple of years to be filled with them.

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

13. Done is the engine of more.

There are ten more where those came from.

fakeisthenewreal's bookmarks tagged Flickr

Boundaries from flickr georeferencing: Tom Taylor has created a map displaying neighborhood data based on geotagged Flickr photos.

eiðibýli: A bunch of Icelandic houses.

Photos tagged with null: It’s a null set.

Clusters of photos tagged with rad: Don’t worry, I’ve already named my next band The Rad Clusters.

Pictures of actors portraying architects in movies

Dutch Dialogues

A New Orleans architect has organized a partnership between Dutch and Louisiana engineers, planners, and scientists.

History repeatedly shows the folly of living in a delta: disasters are common there. …

“Living with the water” has recently become an ordering, corollary principle of Dutch policy. Dutch Dialogues participants believe that adapting a Living with the Water principle is necessary in post-Katrina New Orleans; they likewise reject the false choice posited by those who see only a choice between safety or amenity from water in the Louisiana delta.

Amazing Robocop Rap