The Beauty of Diagrams on the BBC

A couple of episodes in, and The Beauty of Diagrams is proving to be very interesting.  I’m discovering a lot – especially about this geezer…

Celebrating “The Promise” – Darkness on the Edge of Town

To celebrate the release of The Promise by Bruce Springsteen, enjoy Darkness on the Edge of Town on Spotify…

It’s been a while since I listened to it properly…  a reminder of how good some of the songs are.

The LHC and it’s “mini Big Bang”

…the collisions obtained were able to generate the highest temperatures and densities ever produced in an experiment.

“This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

“At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma.”

 

Cool.

• BBC: Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a ‘mini-Big Bang’

Data wars: Google vs Facebook

“We have a data-liberation engineering team dedicated to building import and export tools for users. We are not alone. Many other sites allow users to import and export their information, including contacts, quickly and easily. But sites that do not, such as Facebook, leave users in a data dead end,” Google said in a statement. “[W]e will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users’ Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites.”

 

• Wired: Google Calls Out Facebook’s Data Hypocrisy, Blocks Gmail Import

The Royal Observatory Planetarium – a great day out

 

The majority of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (London) is free to get in and is well worth a visit – perfect if you are interested in the origins of time or the expanse of the universe.

You have to pay to get into the Planetarium, but the show is worth every penny.

• The Royal Observatory

Process your data and pay only for what you use – with a little help from your friends

Now there is no need to have your own Hadoop cluster – run it on Amazon, which will keep the cost to a minimum.  With the help of some new open source software.  Check out the first part of the blog post below…

* Strata Week: Political lessons from data land