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Invisible Parade

Links

  • A Striking Perspective on New York City Property Values | Metrocosm  (metrocosm.com)

    Property values across the U.S., where the area of each state has been substituted for its total property value.

  • The Night My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was  (www.vice.com)

    Because of her dissociative identity disorder, I was a stranger in the eyes of the woman I loved.

    Beautifully written, and a reminder that something like 50 First Dates is actually a terrifying situation

  • Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets  (www.newyorker.com)

    Ricky Jay is a legend, and is without a doubt one of my favorite magicians to watch. His shows leave you with a greater appreciation for the magician’s craft, rather than just the immediate illusion they present.

  • Homer's Last Theorem  (boingboing.net)

    A look into the deep, dark, strangely complicated world of Simpsons mathematics.

    I knew that Futurama has a lot of great mathematics involved, but I didn’t realize that it started in the Simpsons.

  • Pipino: Gentleman Thief — EPIC MAGAZINE — Medium  (medium.com)

    Magicians, Mafiosos, a Missing Painting, and the Heist of a Lifetime

  • The Time Everyone "Corrected" the World’s Smartest Woman  (priceonomics.com)

    In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant correctly answered a probability puzzle in her column for Parade Magazine. And then, the world called her an idiot.

    I still remember the chaos caused by the Monty Hall problem in our high school math class. Here's my explanation for how it works:

    • Your first choice could either be a car or a goat.
      1. If you picked the car, you will win the car by not changing your guess.
      2. If you picked a goat, the host will reveal the second goat. The last door left will be the car, so you are guaranteed to win if you change your guess.
    • You have two possible strategies to win the car:
      1. Try to pick the car on your first guess, and don't change the guess.
      2. Try to pick a goat on your first guess, and change the guess after the host opens another door.
    • The second strategy is better, since picking a goat is twice as easy as picking the car.

    The best strategy is to try to pick a goat in round 1. Once the host has revealed the second goat, you are guaranteed the car by switching doors.

  • A Teenager’s View on Social Media — Backchannel — Medium  (medium.com)

    Very informative description of how teens and college students use the major social networks

  • The Rise of the Professional Cyber Athlete  (www.newyorker.com)

    Very cool profile of Scarlett, a professional StarCraftII player

  • AWS Lambda  (aws.amazon.com)

    You can trigger an AWS Lambda function to automatically create a thumbnail when an image is uploaded to Amazon S3, verify address updates in an Amazon DynamoDB table, or process click-stream data in an Amazon Kinesis stream, without having to manage any compute infrastructure.

    Billing is metered in increments of 100 milliseconds, making it cost-effective and easy to scale automatically from a few requests per day to thousands per second.

  • Relationship Test - Dataclysm  (dataclysm.org)

    My team and I wrote an app that will apply findings from a recent research paper to your Facebook graph. The app won’t post to your wall but it will show you both the shape of your friend network and which of your friends are most mathematically important to your life.

    Instead of looking at a metric like the number of friends you have in common, this algorithm takes it a step further. It looks at how well connected your mutual friends are with each other, and suggests that having more diverse mutual friends indicates a stronger, more important relationship.

    If everyone at work is connected via Facebook, then you will have many friends in common with your coworkers, but this doesn’t mean that these are your most important relationships. Since all of your common friends are within the same social circle, you know that these relationships are limited in scope.

    But if you and a friend’s mutual connections include coworkers, college roommates, and cycling buddies, then you know that your relationship with this person spans many social circles, and they are more likely to be important to you. This also is effective at picking out romantic relationships.

    There seemed to be issues with outliers when I tried it because there were a number of people with little or no mutual friends with very high scores, but in general the results were surprisingly accurate.

    It’s also fun to look at the graph of your network and see the clusters of different social circles.