I haven’t literally been back to Italy. I’m just revisiting the Identify Italy project.
Quick recap: According to a reputable source, Italy has 28% more elevators than the United States (and is “the world’s largest market for elevators”, despite Spain having more elevators than Italy).
When I read it, this statistic struck me as unusual. Italy has 1/30th the land area and 1/5th the population of the United States (as well as a Census, whose website banner crushes the US Census’ website).
Continue Reading
The Pillow servers are back online after a power supply failure which affected the server for a majority of this week.
I’m considering switching to a decentralized Raspberry Pi architecture. Now accepting Pi donations.
Continue Reading
It’s here! Take a stab at figuring out what’s what in Italy:
http://pillow.rscheme.org/italy/
Continue Reading
Urban City? Suburban homes? Rural farmland? Factories?
Who knows? Brownie points to whoever can correctly identify the type of buildings in the lower left portion of the image.
Continue Reading
A friend of mine is working on a shuffling algorithm. Here’s what he’s got:
int *shuffle2(int numItems) { //int index[numItems]; int *randomIndex = malloc(sizeof(int)*numItems); int i,j; for(i = 0; i < numItems; i++) { //index[i] = 0; randomIndex[i] = -1; } int randomNum = rand()%numItems; for(j = 0; j < numItems; j++) { while(randomIndex[randomNum] != -1) { randomNum = rand()%numItems;//random(0, numItems-1); } //index[randomNum] = 1; randomIndex[randomNum] = j; } return randomIndex; } It has certain problems.
Continue Reading
So for grins I implemented pagerank on Wikipedia (this was actually last month). I figured I'd share my results (and code, although it's kind of a hack job) in case anyone was curious how it turned out. The code is here: https://github.com/lkolbly/pagerank There are two folders: pagecount/ contains code to download the November page view data and aggregate it. pagerank/ contains all the code to parse the Wikipediaenwiki dump, parse it, and run pagerank on the result.
Continue Reading
Happy New Year! (in about 30 minutes, at least)
Goodbye, 2014. It was nice knowing you, but frankly I’m glad we’re moving on.
2015 should be a blast. Let’s wait and see!
Continue Reading
http://www.usda.gov/factbook/chapter2.pdf
Average food consumption per person per day: 5.26 lbs
Average water consumption per person per day: 4.18 lbs
Average mass consumption per person per day: 9.44 lbs
Someone will consume 94 pounds over the course of 10 days. Give or take.
Hypothetically, if you had to ship a friend to Italy, it would take 10 days by UPS, and the box would weigh roughly 224 pounds. If they fit inside a 3 foot cube box, which would be a bit cramped but survivable, then the billable weight is 282 pounds.
Continue Reading
And by “renovation” I really just mean “it’s back to working.”
Have a great rest of October!
Continue Reading
