Monday Links from the Shade Vol. XXVII

[Moscow Mule]

• Making of the Moscow Metro map - a detailed explanation of the process of designing a new metro map. (It's still not as good as the Tube map, though.)

Memories!

[Spacecadet]

[*]The Tau Manifesto - "Welcome to the Tau Manifesto. This manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice of circle constant is π —but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article 'π Is Wrong!, π is wrong. It’s time to set things right."

So it wasn't just me who 2π everywhere

[*]Bill Gates’ predictions about speech recognition: a historical review - an amusing compilation of fail

“Bulltulip is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”

A bit unfair, he was projecting 5-10 years into the future and Bills big speeches have always had that head in the clouds, overly optimistic feel to them.

[NickFitz]

More underlined words to click on:

• The Night I Met Einstein - by Jerome Weidman - Derek Sivers republishes Weidman's account of how Einstein taught him music appreciation in an evening: "...I could see from the look in my neighbor’s extraordinary eyes that their owner was not merely going through the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I placed on my part in the verbal exchange, to this man his part in it mattered very much. Above all, I could feel that this was a man to whom you did not tell a lie, however small."
  
  
• The Chaocipher revealed! - "The Chaocipher is a devious cipher system invented in 1918 by John F. Byrne: allegedly, it was so complex that nobody could crack his challenge ciphertexts (even with the plaintext to refer to!), yet was so simple that its mechanism was claimed to comprise only two rotating disks small enough to fit in a cigar box, and could be operated by a ten-year-old (admittedly a diligent, determined and well-practised one) to encipher and decipher texts." Byrne's papers have now been donated to the US National Cryptological Museum, and the details of how the Chaocipher works are being unravelled for the first time.
  
  
• The Tau Manifesto - "Welcome to the Tau Manifesto. This manifesto is dedicated to one of the most important numbers in mathematics, perhaps the most important: the circle constant relating the circumference of a circle to its linear dimension. For millennia, the circle has been considered the most perfect of shapes, and the circle constant captures the geometry of the circle in a single number. Of course, the traditional choice of circle constant is π —but, as mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article 'π Is Wrong!, π is wrong. It’s time to set things right."
  
  
• How not to redact images - ValleyWag was a bit lazy about obscuring information derived from an AT&T security breach, and Rajstennaj Barrabas shows how to get it back: "Looking even closer, note that the anti-alias has has turned the black-and-white digits into blocks of color... Because of the color separation, the base line of any digit becomes a fingerprint for that digit."
  
  
• Bill Gates’ predictions about speech recognition: a historical review - an amusing compilation of fail
  
  
• Making of the Moscow Metro map - a detailed explanation of the process of designing a new metro map. (It's still not as good as the Tube map, though.)
  
  
• The Newest Wonder of the World: The Ruins of Modern Greece - "Georges Kalaras used to view with pride the sports hall built near his home here for the 2004 Olympic competition in rhythmic gymnastics and ping pong... when the Olympic torch went out after the Athens Summer Games six years ago, the doors closed here, as well as at many of the 30-odd other sites built or renovated for the Olympics that summer." AKA London 2013.
  
  
• Stupid Is As Stupid Does - Plain speaking from Andy Rutledge: "If you have 'stupid clients' it’s because you’re behaving stupidly to begin with, for we attract what we project. If you’ll stop being stupid, your clients’ IQs will increase dramatically."
  
  
• Python Module of the Week - "The Python Module of the Week series, or PyMOTW, is a tour of the Python standard library through short examples. This is version 1.118, last updated Jun 27, 2010 to cover the site module." Excellent resource from Doug Hellmann. (Obligatory XKCD link.)
  
  
• PostSecret - "PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard." Example: "I used to be afraid of poor people until I lost all my money and became one."

Happy invoicing!