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Archive for 2010

The Brattleboro Tablet

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

Rolf wrote in with the following message for the readers of KrazyDad: Here is a link to a website that has photos of the large clay tablet unearthed recently by archeologists from the University of Brattleboro. Here is a link to a photo of the tablet on Flickr. The tablet, which measures 16 inches by […]

Recent Twitter Volume

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Here is my estimate of worldwide Twitter volume since November 7th. A few things to note: * The growth in overall tweets per day has slowed a lot since the beginning of the year – it started to stall a bit in the autumn. Recent Comscore results show that visits to the Twitter website began […]

Twitter Volume since 2007

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

This weekend I compiled the data to produce the above graph, showing the level of activity on Twitter. I figured this out using a commonly known method. Every tweet has a unique id number, for example the 20 that appears in the URL of this tweet which kicked off the service: http://twitter.com/#!/ev/statuses/20 Assuming these id […]

Scam Email #2394

Friday, October 1st, 2010

A more individually tailored version of the famous 411 scam arrived in my inbox this morning. I thought I’d share: From: customerservice@citibank-group.com Date: Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 12:18 AM Subject: SUB: CUSTOMER INFORMATION * Attention The Genealogical database of our deceased customer Mr. Bill Bumgardner has revealed you as his family relative. Kindly confirm […]

Bridges (Hashi) Puzzles are here

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Hey folks, I’ve added some new Bridges puzzles to the site. In Japan, Bridges are known as Hashiwokakero which means “Bridge Building”. They are also known here as Hashi. In these puzzles, you are presented with a collection of numbered circles, which represent islands. You connect the islands with bridges to form a network of […]

Facebook and gender-bias in names

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Some weeks back, I used Facebook’s open graph API to read about 1.2 million names from Facebook users. I used it to construct this file, which shows, for each name, the number of times it occurs, the number of times it’s used by males, and the number of times it occurs in females. To keep […]

Whitney Music Box on Reddit

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

My Whitney Music Box made the front page of Reddit today, and is being picked up by a few other sites. Here are some blog entries I wrote about it, back when I was working on it: Visual Harmony A φ Fractal Dan Piker’s Whitney Variations HensTooth Discs Whitney Music Box simulation Also check out […]

The Alphabet, according to Google Search Suggestions

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

A is for Amazon B is for Best Buy C is for Craigslist D is for Dictionary E is for EBay F is for Facebook G is for Gmail H is for Hotmail I is for IKEA J is for Jet Blue K is for Kohls L is for Lowes M is for MapQuest N […]

Galaxy Puzzles

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

The latest addition to my puzzle collection, Galaxies are elegant puzzles in which symmetry forms an essential component. You are presented with a grid containing circles, in seemingly random positions. You fill in the lines of the grid to form an island, or galaxy around each circle. The galaxy shapes must be rotationally (or 180° […]

Yochanan’s Crossfigure Puzzles

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Eighty-seven year old puzzle constructor Yochanan wrote to tell me he has posted scans of his hand-made crossfigure puzzles. You’ll find 80 puzzles, divided into 4 collections here. I find these puzzles to be excellent. However, because they are scans from a book, it helps to zoom in on each page to make the puzzles […]