Items of Interest

Zero Is The Hero

Atlantic Philathropies, the organisation setup by Chuck Feeney to give away his huge fortune, has published their final report titled Zero Is The Hero. The report gives an overview of the amounts invested around the world in different industries. The fascinating story of Chuck Feeney is told excellently in the book The Billionaire Who Wasn't (affiliate link) by Conor Clery.

Business

History

Innovation

Motivation

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52 Things from 2019

#193

Tom Whitwell has put together a cracking list of interesting facts he learnt in 2019. These include why British motorways are not built in straight lines, where the 10,000 steps thing came from, there were between 0 and 2 Nigels born in the UK in 2016, and that Ireland had it's own timezone until 1916 (see also Mean Time at Richmond Barracks).

Life

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Toyota Future City

#193

Toyota are planning to build a prototype city of the future called Woven City on 175 acres at the base of Mt. Fuji. The city will be fully powered by hydrogen fuel cells and it will feature segregated transport links for different type of autonomous zero emissions vehicles and state of the art robot filled smart residences made of wood using traditional Japanese wood joinery. The first population set of 2000 people will be employees, retirees and industry partners. Ground breaking is due to start in 2021.

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What Colour Is Your Name?

#193

Synesthesia is a rare sensory trait shared by about 4% of the population. Bernadette Sheridan has created an interactive tool to visualise the colours associated with the letters of a name as experienced by people with grapheme-color synesthesia.

Data Vis

Life

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The History of Ketchup

#192

The Saturday Evening Post has an interesting article on the history of Ketchup. It originated in 17th century China as a fermented fish sauce, without tomatoes, called ke-tsiap before travelling along the British empire to the west.

History

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Perl Paint Splatters

#192

According to Colin McMillen, 93% of paint splatters can be recognised as valid Perl code using OCR software.

Tech

Web Dev

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Catering For End Users

#192

The Instadeq Blog has a great list of things that end users care about but programmers don't, such as "Use the fonts I use in Office" and "emoji support".

Design

Tech

Web Dev

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Awesome Design Tools

#192

Lisa Dziuba has created a huge list of design tools for every scenario, from logo design and wireframing to augmented reality and 3D modelling tools.

Design

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Ordered Data Structres Vs Hash Tables

#192

Evan Jones published an interesting and helpful article on the differences between ordered data structures and hash-tables, and when is best to use them.

Tech

Web Dev