Amit Patel

"New representations of thought — written language, mathematical notation, information graphics, etc — have been responsible for some of the most significant leaps in the progress of civilization, by expanding humanity’s collectively-thinkable territory." - Amit Patel

"But the dynamic medium offers the opportunity to deliberately invent a humane and empowering form of knowledge work. We can design dynamic representations which draw on the entire range of human capabilities — all senses, all forms of movement, all forms of understanding — instead of straining a few and atrophying the rest." - Amit Patel

Peter was telling me about this guy earlier this month - he went to some workshop up in SF Bret put on I think. - Laura Norvig

"None of us are angry about everything, or even most things, but in the whole slimy pond of troubles there is something to injure every one of us in a particular and personal way that makes us turn to the stream and yell this is bullshit. And each shout makes the water rise a little higher, because how can you not respond to your friends when they’re in pain? Add in the flood of information and emotion from something like Ferguson (or war crimes or an epidemic) and there we all are, gradually drowning. So people get huffy about the volume emotion that these events arouse—angry that others are angry about the wrong things or too many things or in the wrong register." - Amit Patel

"Beyond the tools, though, I’m trying to make an emotional shift from exuberant joyful angry frenetic Twitter to something subtler and gentler. When moved to discuss something about which I feel strongly, I’m beginning to default to a longer form first, to reduce the heat of my Twitter conversations and boost the light I work by elsewhere." - Amit Patel

"We’ve received so many demonstration requests that we decided to put together this overview video so everyone, not just operators or the press, can see an example of what transportation systems need to handle on a daily or even monthly basis. With limited data and resources, transit operators do the best they can to get people where they need to be. Urban Engines helps them better monitor, plan for, and optimize vehicles and improve commutes." - Amit Patel

"Just east of the Andes, central Colombia’s Caño Cristales is a river like no other. Reaching 100km long and sometimes called the “Liquid Rainbow”, Caño Cristales runs during certain months of the year with shades of red, blue, yellow, orange and green in a vibrant natural display that happens nowhere else on Earth. (Eric Mohl)" - Amit Patel

The model (solid line) predicts lots of ebola cases; the observed infections (shaded gray bars) matches the model pretty well. Their model suggests Guinea and Sierra Leone will flatten out but Liberia will still be growing, unless there's some intervention. - Amit Patel

Yes, it's always a sigmoidal curve … we just don't know where it will plateau - Amit Patel

"Even these relatively simple equations take some work to decipher. The letters tend to blend together into a jumble of meaningless symbols. Consider an alternative from a prototype programming environment:" - Amit Patel

Soulver, a glorious calculator, incorporates some basic ideas mentioned in the article: http://www.acqualia.com/soulver... - sizofroid‪‪‪‪‪‪‪

What! - Amit Patel

"These technological advances will enable even better image understanding on our side and the progress is directly transferable to Google products such as photo search, image search, YouTube, self-driving cars, and any place where it is useful to understand what is in an image as well as where things are." - Amit Patel

TL;DR: Google's brain has learned how to identify the objects it sees - Amit Patel

"I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own. Is that a large ship? Does 60 billion miles take you outside the Solar System? How much is $21 billion compared to the overall budget?" - Amit Patel

"A friend of mine, Glen Chiacchieri, has created a Chrome extension to help solve this problem: Dictionary of Numbers. It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase “315 million people” into “315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]“." - Amit Patel

"After a long development journey we are excited that Train Fever is now officially available on Steam and in retail stores in the German speaking world! First and most important, we would like to express a huge thank you. The community (crowdfunding supporters and beta testers in particular) did a great job and without all the support, feedback, suggestions and challenging questions, Train Fever would not be on the current level. We have learned a lot by carefully listening to all of you." - Amit Patel

I've been looking forward to this game! - Amit Patel

"A musical underlay highlights an emphasis point in an audio story. The music track contains three segments; (1) a music pre-solo that fades in before the emphasis point, (2) a music solo that starts at the emphasis point and plays at full volume while the speech is paused, and (3) a music post-solo that fades down as the speech resumes. At the beginning of the solo, the music often changes in some significant way (e.g. a melody enters, the tempo quickens, etc.) Aligning this change point in the music with a pause in speech and a rapid increase in the music volume further draws attention to the emphasis point in the story." - Amit Patel

With online demo! - Amit Patel

"The slider images above depict Mount Shasta in full snowclad splendor (January 2007) and last week. The sequence of images below begins with the 2007 shot, includes a view from July 2013, and ends with last week." - Amit Patel

Craig Knecht is obsessed with magic squares; he's building them with "water flow" and then making patterns of water that is contained within the walls. - Amit Patel

This page shows california's electricity use - Amit Patel

We're gonna need that water a lot sooner than in 30 years. - Victor Ganata

TL;DR: spiders are getting bigger. In Australia of all places. - Amit Patel

soon they'll need WOF stickers. - Big Joe Silenced

Woah, I didn't realize Venn diagrams could be used for more than 3 sets - Amit Patel

"Commissioned in the mid-1970s, the project is managed by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. Completion of the system is not anticipated until 2029" - Amit Patel

"The megaproject is one of the largest civil engineering projects ever undertaken in terms of scope, cost and timeframe. " - Amit Patel

Research project to reconstruct animal gaits, including for extinct or imaginary animals - Amit Patel

TL;DR: DINOSAURS - Amit Patel

"Now that the 2048 craze is finally dying down and you thought you'd get back to your productive self, a new contender called Hextris has entered the ring." - Amit Patel

Friend of mine is getting unexpected amounts of traffic after his game was posted to reddit, hackernews, twitter. Fun :) - Amit Patel

"The next great open-source game has arrived. Earlier this year, the world was engrossed by 2048, an open-source puzzle game which attracted millions of players, and perhaps billions of games. Now comes the recently-created Hextris, a hexagonal version of the hit game Tetris." - Amit Patel

"Ibrisagic posted the very first gameplay trailer, went to bed, and woke up to 80,000 views. By the time he made his five-minute walk to the office, there were 100,000. "It just became bigger and bigger and bigger, and at the end, I remember GameSpot made a video about why Goat Simulator needs to happen, that games can be stupid sometimes. People wrote really long emails to us to explain why this was important to the industry. We began to feel that maybe we could release this thing, and that maybe if we didn't someone might shoot me on the way to the office." " - Amit Patel

"The meanderiness of a river, its Stølum number, is defined as the length the water travels from source to finish (blue curve) divided by the direct distance (red line).  This can change chaotically as a river changes coarse, forming Ox bow lakes. The ratio is often found to converge to (but rarely exceed) 3.14, roughly pi." - Amit Patel

Hm, that makes sense! :) - Amit Patel

(animated gif - click through to see) - Amit Patel

"This week I traveled to northeast China to check out a bitcoin mining operation. After being received at the airport, my contact drove me for nearly an hour to a part of the country more remote than I was expecting. This was my first time checking out a mining operation of this size, so I don’t really know what I was expecting, but I was definitely surprised by how off the beaten path it was." - Amit Patel

I think back to the beanie baby bubble … but at least you got some beanie babies out of it. - Amit Patel

"This film is the world’s first balanced look into the city that is actually beautiful in its own way. We reveal not only Pyongyang’s built environment and landmarks, but also the people of Pyongyang. Needless to mention, this video has made an enormous impact by positively expanding global perceptions of Pyongyang and drastically boosting global interest in visiting the city." - Amit Patel

"Client: Koryo Tours & Korea International Tourism Company (KITC)" - Amit Patel

Neat project! They collect data on how model airplanes fly, then build a model from that, then have an interactive airplane designer that uses the model to predict how the airplane will fly. It shows you the expected capabilities, then has an auto-optimize feature to make adjustments to make it fly better. Then you print it out and fly it :) - Amit Patel

"Today’s young people are held to be alienated, unhappy, violent failures. They are proving anything but" - Amit Patel

"Teenagers appear not just to be waiting longer for sex, but also by-and-large to be being careful about what they get up to once they get started." - Amit Patel

"Today, the strange story of a small group of islands that raise a big question: is it inevitable that even our most sacred natural landscapes will eventually get swallowed up by humans? And just how far are we willing to go to stop that from happening?" - Amit Patel

This podcast was a little disturbing. But also fascinating. - Amit Patel

"Hextris is a fast paced, addictive puzzle game inspired by Tetris." - Amit Patel

In my day kids didn't have such an easy way to share games they made… - Amit Patel