Author Archives: gavin

Make it yourself: A Thing-O-Matic Case Study

Makerblock receives a gift of colored pencils from his wife. But how to carry them? A few years ago he’d have to be happy with a trusty rubber band. But this is 2011. How does he solve his problem? “After measuring them with my trusty calipers, I found they were 7mm from flat side to flat [...]
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Your Hedge Fund Howto

“Fresh out of college, with no background in finance, I learned high frequency trading (HFT) first hand while bootstrapping my startup from nothing to trading tens of millions of shares daily for a billion-dollar hedge fund. I’m starting this blog to discuss the technical challenges related to building world class HFT system, including developing [...]
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On Spacefilling Curves & the Traveling Salesman Problem

“Paul Goldsman used the spacefilling curve heuristic to solve the same instance [15,112 cities in Germany]. Our solution was about 34% longer. At a leisurely 600 km of travel per day this means the time to drive our solution would be about 147 days versus 110 days for the solution of Bixby, Chvatal, and Cook. [...]
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Water-powered turbine generator idea: Strait Power

“designed originally as his senior project at the college for creative studies in the united states, industrial designer anthony reale’s ’strait power’ provides a highly efficient redesign of water-powered turbine generators.” “realized, tested, and archived over 130 days, the project involved 711 hours of production work and 200 testing hours, as well as 95,000 USD worth [...]
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Words I Love: Computational Art

“From generated pixels on a screen to artwork, translating computer art to prints can give computer-produced visuals new life. This week, Christina Vassallo lets us know about her new series of silkscreened limited editions from two artists whose work in code (via Processing) we already know and love. [...] Just seeing that MacBook Pro and [...]
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Cleaning & transforming your data with Stanford’s Wrangler

Wrangler Demo Video from Stanford Visualization Group on Vimeo. “Too much time is spent manipulating data just to get analysis and visualization tools to read it. Wrangler is designed to accelerate this process: spend less time fighting with your data and more time learning from it. Wrangler allows interactive transformation of messy, real-world data into the [...]
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Fractals all up in your browsers

“Today, we launched Julia Map on Google Labs, a fractal renderer in HTML 5. [...] Julia Map uses the Google Maps API to zoom and pan into the fractals. The images are computed with HTML 5 canvas. Each image generally requires millions of floating point operations. Web workers spread the heavy calculations on all cores [...]
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Food Fashion

So many choice quotes from the article, “Tasteful Attire: Designers Whip Up a Buffet of Fashion Out of Food” from the WSJ: “Try to keep the chocolate away from the armpit area,” advises Ms. Mahoney, a self-described “chocolate artist.” Such esoteric insight is useful for image-makers riding a wave of interest in clothing made out of [...]
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Paul Housberg Glass Design

“Stained glass has a few associations for us, namely: church and church. Also: church. Which makes what Paul Housberg does for a living nothing short of revolutionary: He takes the fusty old art of stained glass and updates it for hotels, offices, and universities — those sanctuaries of the modern world. The resulting installations are [...]
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Compulsive Internet Collection #267: Stereo Stack

Totally agree with A Time To Get. Thank goodness for compulsive internet collectors who collect cool & interesting things. And yes, these are vintage LP stereo banners. Stacked.
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