I finally got the new version of Twitter yesterday, and it looks great. And that's no accident: according to the designer, the layout of the new Twitter interface is based on the Golden Spiral: You can describe the Golden Spiral by laying consecutive squares in a spiral fashion, each square ... [Read more...]

The dating site OK Cupid often publishes on their blog interesting analyses of based on the self-reported data from their users, and the latest post is no exception. Most commentary has focused on race/gender preference analysis: according to the "Likes" sections of OK Cupid profiles, white males like "sweaty ... [Read more...]

Ever wondered how a sewing machine seemingly manages to knot stitches without ever releasing the thread? Well, wonder no more: Find this and other animations of marvels of engineering, including the universal velocity joint and the rotary engine, at the link below. World Of Technology: Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple ... [Read more...]

WARNING: This has nothing to do with national security, but is nonetheless awesome. This evening I will be participating in that great annual tradition which marks the transition from Summer to Fall: the fantasy football draft. A large part of having a successful fantasy football draft is being able to ... [Read more...]

They're foxes. They're on a trampoline. And they're jumping. I don't think there's much more for me to add: [Read more...]

It's sunny up here in Seattle (I'm attending BioConductor 2010 -- Revolution's a sponsor) now that the morning fog has lifted. So in honor of sunny Friday afternoons, I bring you the Double Rainbow song: (If you've been in a wi-fi-less cave for the past couple of weeks, check out the ... [Read more...]

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Birds do it, bees do it. But the bees and their insect brethren definitely do it in a more interesting way. Don't believe me? Check out Isabella Rosselini's description of bee sex and the other videos in her educational "Green Porno" series. It's fascinating stuff. For some light summer reading, ... [Read more...]

The Earth is pretty big. Give or take, it's about 36,000 feet (11km) to the height of a 747 soaring above Everest, and (in pleasing symmetry) about the same distance down the bottom of the Mariana Trench. (Nonetheless, if you shrunk the Earth down to scale, it would still be smoother than ... [Read more...]

When you upload a video to YouTube, they don't store a perfect digital copy of your media file. The video is actually re-encoded into the MPEG-4 video format. This saves space on YouTube's servers, but also introduces some random degradation to the video (as a result of the lossy compression ... [Read more...]

According to internet lore, there's a mathematical equation that governs the lower bound for the socially acceptable age of a potential dating partner: half your age plus 7, or, in mathematical terms, if x is your age then the lower bound is f(x) = x/2 + 7. Seems simple, right? if you're 20, then ... [Read more...]

I lived for 10 years within sight (on a clear day, anyway) of Mount St. Helens, and had seen and heard a lot about the devastation caused by the eruption and pyroclastic flow 30 years ago. But I'd heard relatively little about the effects of the ash cloud settling on land. I ... [Read more...]

Got design skills as well as R skills? The organizers of the useR! 2010 conference are looking for a design to be used on the conference T-shirts. Mango Solutions (who are sponsoring the T-shirt) will select the winner, but personally I'd give extra points for designs that use R itself -- ... [Read more...]

See more of the best illusions of 2010 at the link below. Best Illusion of the Year Contest: Top finalists in the 2010 contest [Read more...]

If you're being particularly cost-conscious about your use of printer ink or toner, you may be wondering which font you should choose to minimize ink use. Here's an infographic with the answer: This is an interesting infographic in its own right, but what makes it cool is that these are ... [Read more...]

This one's for the musicians out there. (By the way, in my purely anecdotal experience, musical aptitude appears to have a higher-then-expected representation amongst stats folks. I however am the exception that proves the rule, as anyone who's suffered through my Rock Band vocals can attest. But I digress.) What ... [Read more...]

Phil Gyford laments crappy infographics swamping the good: Phil Gyford on Flickr: Infographic (used under Creative Commons license) [Read more...]

Posted for no other reason than it warms my gamer-geek heart to see NYC taken over by 8-bit video game characters. The Tetris sequence is particularly cool. Update: The original video was deleted from YouTube, I'm guessing because of copyright issues with the music. This version has no music. (Thanks ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, Drew Conway posted an analysis of the survival time to events on Chatroulette. If you're familiar with Chatroulette, you'll know what kind of events you can expect to occur when using it. (If you're not, here's a hint: don't try it now if you're at work.) Sadly, it was ... [Read more...]

Noted statistician Andrew Gelman has teamed up with occultist George Romero to address the most serious public-health threat of out time: Zombies. They've published a paper in the journal Biomastika, "How many zombies do you know?" to propose the use of indirect survey methods to measure outbreaks of the undead: ... [Read more...]