Rexfeng

This video visualization of 15 different sorting algorithms is mesmerizing. (Don't forget the sound.)

An explanation of the process. You can play with several different kinds of sorts here.

Tags: infoviz   programming   video

The world's largest Lego snow globe is now on display at Covent Garden in London. Lego master builder, Duncan Titmarsh used 120,000 bricks to showcase the London skyline. The build took about 75 days to complete and features 14 London landmarks, including Shakespeare's Globe Theater, the London Eye and Big Ben.

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A binding agreement, as much a social contract as Social Security or Medicare, the traditional Hippocratic Oath holds those who swear to it to a strict code of professional and personal conduct. Contrary to popular belief, though, most doctors never take this oath—and, actually, most of us are probably glad they never do.

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Defying a veto threat, 39 Democrats joined Republicans in approving the measure, which goes further than the fix that President Obama had previously announced.

Rap Genius just got a little more legit. As Billboard reports, the hip-hop lyric and annotation site has signed a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, marking its very first licensing arrangement with a music publisher. The deal was reportedly finalized earlier this year, and it sounds like it won't be the last — Rap Genius co-founder Tom Lehman told Billboard that he expects the site's relationship with artists and publishers to "only grow stronger."

The news comes as the National Music Publishers' Association listed Rap Genius as the worst offender on its "Top 50 Undesirable Lyric Websites" list. "These lyric sites have ignored the law and profited off the songwriters' creative works, and NMPA will not allow this to continue,"...

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The Chinese government today announced that it will ease its longstanding one-child per household population policy, as part of a sweeping set of domestic reforms. According to the Xinhua News Agency, the new policy will allow couples to have two children if either of the two parents was an only child. Under the previous policy, couples could only have two children if both of the parents were only children.

The country's one-chid policy was originally implemented in 1979 as part of an effort to curb population growth in urban areas. The Chinese government has long stood by the law despite appeals from human rights groups, though reports began circulating this summer that the regime was considering a change. The reforms come as part...

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Naughty Dog is developing a new Uncharted game for the PlayStation 4, the developer revealed this evening during Spike's PS4 launch event.

New Uncharted announced for PS4 originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 14 Nov 2013 23:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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President of Boston's Fire Hose Games, Eitan Glinert, breaks down four types of indie developers he sees in the wild:

• The developer starving, eating ramen, with no support system because she's nobody
• The developer begging publishers to give him money, but it turns out the publishers drive him nuts and everything turns to crap
• The developer mooching off every single relative she has to fund her game
• He's already famous

"If you're already famous, that's great, but if you don't have that stuff it's just so hard to get your thing off the ground," Glinert says. There are options for first-time developers - submitting a game to IGF or the PAX 10, or being featured on big websites - but he says there are still roadblocks in the current system.

"I'm sick of it - and it's a solvable problem," he says. He may have solved it, with help from the rest of the team: Fire Hose Games is transitioning into an indie incubator, with plans to take on fresh developers and offer them a place to work, a monthly living wage, revenue share when their games launch, plus advice, experience and a creative atmosphere.

"We want to go ahead and remove the hurdles to game development that these small indie developers face, and we can get some absolutely phenomenal talent in the process," Glinert says. "It's a big win-win. We help these developers make the games they want without all the burden of getting all these bits and pieces aligned, when all they want to do is make the game. We get fantastic talent in the process; we get great games in the process and we're all helping each other."

Continue reading Fire Hose Games' indie incubator: 'It's ridiculous this doesn't exist'

Fire Hose Games' indie incubator: 'It's ridiculous this doesn't exist' originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 14 Nov 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We love when we can use the same wires from one gaming generation to the next. Sony wasn't the first to do this. Let's hope they're not the last.

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Bulk baguettes.

The first French Costco store is set to open in the Parisian suburbs by spring of 2015; it'll be one of six regional stores and 25 overall that the wholesaler hopes to open nationwide in the next twenty years. If the French are wary of subscription-based overbuying (it "terrifies" Eric Ripert), head of Costco France is doing his best to woo them; in April, he described the experience of warehouse shopping as "a treasure hunt." But one with free samples and cigarettes in bulk. [NYP, Le Figaro, Related]

Read more posts by Belle Cushing

Filed Under: hypermarkets, costco, france

From Serious Eats: New York

[Photos: Andrew Coe]

New York's baguette bakers like to play with their bread: Prosciutto, Parmesan and picholine baguettes! Kosher baguettes! Buckwheat baguettes! Big, soft, and crappy baguettes! So last summer, Keith Cohen of Orwasher's had a radical concept. What about making the best possible real French baguettes? He contacted Cornell professor Steven L. Kaplan, who is acknowledged as the world's expert on baguettes and the man who led the loaf's revival in Paris. Kaplan tasted the Orwasher's New York-style French baguettes and said: "You need to see Alexandre Viron."

In August, Keith and one of his head bakers traveled to France to meet Viron, a fifth generation miller and baker (under the Retrodor brand name) specializing in traditional flours. His father Philippe helped lead the movement to recover the Paris baguette tradition and return the loaf to its simple, artisan roots. Under Alexandre's guidance, the Orwasher's team spent two weeks in the Viron mill and bakery learning the art of making classic French baguettes. That included mixing flour, water, salt, and yeast; two fermentations, shaping and scoring the loaf, and the final baking. By the end of their stay, Keith and his baker were making 1,500 loaves a day and were ready to bring their skills to New York.

In his bakery, Keith and his bakers made room for a French baguette shaping machine and a few thousand pounds of Viron flour and began to mix. Today, you can buy the Orwasher's French Baguette ($3.50), which usually arrives in its store around lunchtime. From the inside out, this loaf nails the key qualities of a classic baguette. It's baked to a golden running to dark brown color with the requisite five slash marks across the top. When tapped, the loaf gives a hollow sound, and the crust crackles when squeezed. Inside, the crumb is cream-colored and broken up by large and small air pockets. If you pull it open and stick your nose inside, it has an enticing, faintly yeasty, nutty aroma. When you chew it, the bread is slightly moist with a lovely texture that makes it hard to stop eating.

The Orwasher's French Baguette is clearly now one of the top baguettes in the city. But is it the best? Stay tuned for the an update to our best baguette in New York post very soon. In the meantime you can buy the Orwasher's baguette at its store and at its stands at the New Amsterdam Market and the Prospect Park and Greenpoint Greenmarkets.

About the author: Andrew Coe is the only reporter covering the city's bread beat.

The Wall Street Journal goes behind the scenes today at a very stressful job interview for the coolest job in the world: Designer at Lego world headquarters in Billund, Denmark.

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Something strange is going down in Turtle Bay. No, I’m not talking geopolitical intrigue at the UN. I’m talking about the BonChon on 2nd Ave. (btw. 50th+51st) changing its name to BarKogi. According to the menu, the name is apparently all that’s changed. Luncher Andrew let us know that the food is identical to BonChon, [...]

Intel might be known for its processors inside PCs, but the company is now experimenting with a line of retail stores this holiday. A range of Intel "experience" pop-up stores are set to debut shortly, with the first opening in New York on November 23rd. The stores are designed for the holidays, and are only open until late January. In a promotional video, Intel claims it’s "redefining retail" with free coffee each day, free movies on Friday’s, and a showcase of PCs, tablets, and other Intel-powered devices at the stores.

Pop-up stores designed to boost Intel's brand

The pop-up stores will change physically three times daily, and it appears that Intel has built a dynamic layout to help shift products around in its retail stores....

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Roger Cheng, reporting for CNet:

The carrier said it is facing pressure to deliver increased amounts of bandwidth in big cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. In a rare admission on Tuesday, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo admitted the rapid growth in traffic was starting to hamper the quality of the service.

“There are certain pockets where we’re absolutely going to experience that down tick from the LTE network down to 3G because of capacity constraints,” Shammo said during an investor conference.

I was in New York yesterday, and saw this firsthand. Verizon LTE has gone to shit in Midtown Manhattan.

Update: On Twitter, reader Rory Berger reports, “I work in Midtown East and I turn off LTE all day. Verizon 3G is much more reliable (although still shit).”

And Carl Peluso asks an intriguing question: “Is Verizon finally feeling the pressure of iPhone on their network like AT&T in past, or is that [an] invalid issue nowadays?”

Put another way: How much of the pressure on Verizon’s LTE network in these big cities is from the iPhone in particular?

Six months of alarming revelations about US surveillance programs and the botched launch of HealthCare.gov have taken a toll on President Obama's standing with the American people. Trust in the president is trending downward, according to a recent Gallup poll. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed disagreed with the notion that Obama "is honest and trustworthy," though a slight majority (50 percent) still think the description applies. It's a worrying development for a president whose personality often polls well with the public. Worse yet, 52 percent of voters answered that Obama is not honest and trustworthy in a similar poll from Quinnipiac University, with just 44 percent supporting the president. "Any elected official with an...

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According to the Obama administration, Healthcare.gov saw fewer than 27,000 signups via the main website. State websites fared better, coming in at more than 79,000 signups. All told, 106,185 people enrolled in the program overall, a far cry from the 500,000 it expected when the site opened on October 1st.

Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius says that she expects the things to improve, the Associated Press reports. Sebelius and the White House have weathered a long month of criticism surrounding the botched launch of Healthcare.gov and the glitches that have so far prevented the 7 million Americans shopping for insurance coverage the administration hopes to enroll by next year. US chief technology officer Todd Park e...

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New data also show that in the first month of open enrollment, 26,794 signed up through the problem-plagued federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, and the rest through state exchanges.

Writing in the Times, Frank Bruni notes the increasing tendency in the US to provide various levels of service for money.

Much has been made of commercial flights these days, with all those divisions between first class and coach. For various supplements or with various deals, you can get a few more inches of legroom or, shy of that, a prime aisle seat. You can get to board earlier or later, and thus hoard or miss out on the overhead bins. Will it be long before there's a ranked queue for the bathroom? I'm not even sure I'm kidding.

It's not that pecking orders or badges of affluence are anything new. Our homes, cars, clubs and clothes have long been advertisements of our economic clout, used and perceived that way.

But lately, the places and ways in which Americans are economically segregated and stratified have multiplied, with microclimates of exclusivity popping up everywhere. The plane mirrors the sports arena, the theater, the gym. Is it any wonder that class tensions simmer? In a country of rising income inequality and an economy that's moved from manufacturing to services, one thing we definitely make in abundance is distinctions.

Reminds me of Tom Junod's piece in Esquire about waiting in line as an expression of American democracy.

Apparently, an Englishman named Leonard Sim took his family to Disneyland a few years ago, and his vacation was ruined by waiting in line. He invented something called the Flash Pass, and then sold it to an English company called Lo-Q -- as in "Low Queue" -- which contracted it to Whitewater. So now, when you go to Whitewater and many other American amusement parks, you pay for parking ($15, at Whitewater), and then for admission ($37.50, for any human being over 48 inches tall), and finally for a locker ($16), and then, once you're inside, you can pay an extra $30 for a "standard" Flash Pass or $40 for the "gold." And then you can cut the lines.

It sounds like an innovative answer to the problem that everybody faces at an amusement park, and one perfectly in keeping with the approaches currently in place at airports and even on some crowded American highways -- perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America. You can pay for one level of access, or you can pay for another. If you have the means, you can even pay for freedom. There's only one problem: Cutting the line is cheating, and everyone knows it. Children know it most acutely, know it in their bones, and so when they've been waiting on a line for a half-hour and a family sporting yellow plastic Flash Passes on their wrists walks up and steps in front of them, they can't help asking why that family has been permitted the privilege of perpetrating what looks like an obvious injustice. And then you have to explain not just that they paid for it but that you haven't paid enough -- that the $100 or so that you've ponied up was just enough to teach your children that they are second- or third-class citizens.

Tags: Frank Bruni   Tom Junod   USA

Alex Rainert, Foursquare’s Head of Product — and company employee #10 — has announced that he’s leaving the company.

Rainert hasn’t yet said what his next project will be beyond spending some quality time with his infant son as his wife ends her maternity leave. His duties will be taken over by Noah Weiss, who headed Foursquare’s ad products and John Steinback, the VP of Marketing.

The association between Rainert and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley runs deep. They met on the first day of class at NYU’s ITP program and went on to found Dodgeball together and move to Google when it was acquired. Rainert joined Foursquare in its infancy and was even a groomsman in Crowley’s recent wedding.

In a post on his blog, Rainert said:

I’m so grateful and proud to have had the opportunity to work with an amazing team that consistently punched above its 150-person weight and always brought it in a space crowded with companies 100X our size. I have no doubt they’ll continue to do so and I look forward to watching Dennis and the rest of the team keep pushing to realize the vision we’ve always known to be true.

And Crowley praised Rainert on his Tumblr:

I’ve been friends with Alex for 10 years (since Day 1 @ ITP!), we’ve been working on projects together for 8 years, and we’ve been side-by-side at Foursquare for the past 4 years. We worked together on pioneering the checkin which brought Dodgeball to Google, resurrecting it to power Foursquare’s “crowdsourced cityguide” approach, and reinventing it with all the work Foursquare’s been recently doing with ambient location awareness & proactive recommendations.

I’m going to miss working with him at Foursquare, I’m thankful for all the great work we’ve been able to do over these past 10 (!!) years, and I’m psyched to see what he’s up to next.  Best of luck, pal!

Foursquare’s product has seen some setbacks recently with the removal of the activity feed from the mobile apps, but has also seen some successes in the form of the still-launching proactive recommendations. It will be interesting to see how it transitions after four years of Rainert’s leadership.

His M will be black.

Joe Hallatt's current gig is pretty good: He buys $5,000 worth of Trader Joe's groceries in Washington State every week, then sells them at higher prices across the border in Canada at his own Pirate Joe's, a business that has somehow not been pummeled out of existence by legal Trader Joe's. Now the completely original entrepreneur has a novel concept: a burger chain with a big letter M as the logo. He's thinking something like this, but in black — and besides, his burger will be healthier, so he's not copying anyone, really.

"Let's say you see my black M and you're thinking that must be a reference to McDonald's in some way, you know it's a free market," he says, adding that his signature burger will be chock-full of "fresh, organic, sustainably harvested ingredients." He's turning to crowd-funding, naturally, to fulfill his next dream of being annoying and hopes to open next summer.

No word on what his big M actually stands for, but no matter. Canada's a free country, last time we checked. "McDonald's doesn't have a copyright on the letter M, I don't think," Hallatt tells the CBC.

Pirate Joe's owner plans 'big M' fast food joint [CBC]

Read more posts by Belle Cushing

Filed Under: yo ho ho, mcdonald's, pirate joe's, the big m, trader joe's

[Photo]
The second location of noodle hot spot Totto Ramen opened quietly on Monday in Hell's Kitchen. The new place is just one block west of the original, and serves the same roster of ramens like chicken paitan, miso, and spicy ramen. And while the original is still consistently packed, the second location is still flying under the radar of the noodle-loving masses. Those empty tables shouldn't last long, but with Ippudo's new location also smack in between the two Tottos, maybe all the lines will thin out a little.

For now the second location is open for dinner-only, while the original serves both lunch and dinner. No word yet on when, or if, that will change.
· All Coverage of Totto Ramen [~ENY~]

Almost 30 years after Bill Watterson introduced the world to Calvin and Hobbes, one of the most beloved daily comic strips is finally available as a collection of ebooks. It's not quite the full series, which is available as a giant multi-volume book, but the ebooks on offer cover a fairly large range of strips. There are three in total: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, each of which was previously released as a regular book.

Why the ebooks couldn't be released in numbered volumes is anyone's guess, but even with the obtuse naming, the trio still offer up a wider range of content than was previously available on mobile devices. Until now, the only way to...

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Since she took over as CEO, Marissa Mayer has been working hard to revitalize Yahoo. She's insisted employees stop working from home, axed unproductive workers, and purged the rolls of unused email accounts. Today Yahoo announced that it has discovered a trove of domain names the company purchased but never ended up doing anything with. So in the spirit of renewal, they're putting them up for auction.

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Breaking into the big time.

Now that Umami Burger is a bona fide hit in New York, Adam Fleischman wants to go international. He's planning to open 150 locations in the next five years — but that's not all. Fleischman's also opening additional outposts of 800 Degrees, his build-your-own-pizza restaurant, and launching Smoke.oil.salt, a Spanish restaurant on Melrose Avenue. Plus: He's behind a new members-only food-and-art-focused club called Truffl, and at a recent event in his home, he taught members how to make burgers. The question is, just how much would you pony up to hear Fleischman say that buns should feel "kinda like a baby's bottom" and it's important to "treat your burger like your lover"? Figure it out: Truffl's slated to come to New York soon. [Earlier, LAT]

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: empire building, adam fleischman, truffl, umami burger

Those hoping the surprisingly intuitive controls of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 incarnations of Diablo 3 might make their way to the PC are out of luck. According to Blizzard, the games are just too different to make that work properly.

"The rhythm on PC is tactactactactactac - you're clicking the mouse, you're telling your character where to go," said senior level designer Matthew Berger. "On console, the rhythm is very different. It flows more, because you're constantly repositioning your character with the thumbstick; you're really never stationary on console, whereas on PC you're a lot more stationary ... When you're playing on the PC, you're not really looking at your character as much, you're kind of focusing on the cursor. Whereas on console it's the exact opposite, you're drawn in."

That constant motion is the crux of the problem here. The camera in console versions of Diablo 3 is a bit more zoomed-in than its PC counterparts, and when combined with the thumbstick evade, players are presented with a game that is similar, but plays out much more frenetically than its computer counterparts. Bringing that same freedom of movement to the PC game would break its balance.

"[I]f I let you use the controller on the PC, then I have to let you use the user interface that goes with it," Berger told Eurogamer, "and if I give you the roll and I haven't throttled the number of enemies attacking you because the mouse-and-keyboard players can handle all those enemies, but with a controller you have too many guys ... The games have really been structured to take advantage of their environment and their ecosystem, so in the same way it would not be a good fit to put a mouse and keyboard on the console."

"It wouldn't work," Berger added.

Blizzard denies possible gamepad support for Diablo 3 PC originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 12 Nov 2013 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The High Line—otherwise known as the universal answer to the question "Where the hell should I take my visiting aunt/business associate/john?"—will be adding another element to the already enjoyable elevated park: The Spur, a giant, leafy bowl to be located at the walkway's northeast terminus. [ more › ]

When listing high-profile media failures — Portƒolio, The Daily, Mobile ESPN, Joost — don’t forget about Patch, AOL’s unsuccessful attempt to reproduce the magic of the local newspaper. Having only read a Patch a few times, it’s easy to neglect. But Patch has quietly been burning through an obscene amount of money, actually: “hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Nicholas Carlson’s lengthy profile for Business Insider.

This is so much money that it’s impressive. I appreciate the concept of making big bets when you can afford them. But can you imagine any venture capitalist seeing what Patch was able to achieve with its first $10 million — never mind its first $100 million! — and then giving it hundreds of millions more? It sounds insane.

The allure of trying to take over where failing local newspapers leave off is understandable. At their best, community papers have massive local market share and lucrative local advertising capabilities.

Our first plan at Business Insider — back when it was “Silicon Alley Insider” — was actually to build a set of local tech news sites, starting in New York. But that barely lasted a week: We soon realized that most of our readers were coming from outside of New York, and that our best and most popular stories were about companies like Apple and Google. The local stuff rarely performed well, and we went “national” almost immediately. The site has thrived since then.

Still, I realize that local tech news and “real” local news — politics, infrastructure, crime — are completely different things. And it’s easy to see how a national “local” platform like Patch might be the solution: HQ can handle things like technology, distribution, and marketing, while local staffers could write articles and sell ads. It’s a take on a model that can work: See Curbed and Thrillist, for example.

But for Patch, on AOL’s ambitious scale, it obviously hasn’t worked out, for a mix of problems: Not enough people read Patch, probably due to a mix of mediocre, non-essential articles and more-entrenched-than-anticipated incumbents. And as Carlson’s article alleges, the business model — trying to sell web ads to local businesses on locally produced articles — has fundamentally stunk so far. It just doesn’t look like Patch is the answer.

At joint press conferences in New York and Chicago today, the Council for Tall Buildings—a Chicago-based nonprofit—announced its decision to crown the WTC as the tallest building in the United States, beating out the Windy City's Willis Tower by mere feet of spire.

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Esquire has Tom Junod writing profiles of the most famous men in Hollywood: Leonard DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt. This month, Junod tackles George Clooney, who despite not having a big box office hit until Gravity, is right up there with Pitt, Cruise, and Hanks in pure wattage of stardom.

He has other houses. He has one, famously, on Lake Como, in Italy, and he has built another in Cabo. In this, he is not so much of a throwback-after all, Leonardo DiCaprio has a house in Cabo. Indeed, Clooney and DiCaprio once ran into each other in Cabo and struck up a conversation based on their common interest in basketball. They each have ongoing games, and their ongoing games have attained a celebrity of their own. Clooney suggested they might play someday. DiCaprio said sure, but felt compelled to add, "You know, we're pretty serious."

They played at a neighborhood court. "You know, I can play," Clooney says in his living room. "I'm not great, by any means, but I played high school basketball, and I know I can play. I also know that you don't talk shit unless you can play. And the thing about playing Leo is you have all these guys talking shit. We get there, and there's this guy, Danny A I think his name is. Danny A is this club kid from New York. And he comes up to me and says, 'We played once at Chelsea Piers. I kicked your ass.' I said, 'I've only played at Chelsea Piers once in my life and ran the table. So if we played, you didn't kick anybody's ass.' And so then we're watching them warm up, and they're doing this weave around the court, and one of the guys I play with says, 'You know we're going to kill these guys, right?' Because they can't play at all. We're all like fifty years old, and we beat them three straight: 11-0, 11-0, 11-0. And the discrepancy between their game and how they talked about their game made me think of how important it is to have someone in your life to tell you what's what. I'm not sure if Leo has someone like that."

Tags: celebrity   George Clooney   Hollywood   Leonardo DiCaprio   movies   Tom Junod