Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social
I like languages (spoken & programming) and live in the Midwestern US but enjoy all places and cultures. Favorite genre: slice of life. https://fasiha.github.io
# of daily editors seen on English #Wikipedia, January 2001 to December 2017—anonymous users, logged in users, then two kinds of bots.
So, lazyfediverse:
What happened 2006/2007? Was the financial collapse presaged by collapsing Wiki edit activity? Did Peak Oil trigger Peak Wiki?
(I've spent a month getting a metric ton [~1 GB JSON, converting into ~2 GB NetCDFs] of historic data from Wikimedia REST API and this is the first visualization I made. Won't be the last. https://github.com/fasiha/wikiatrisk)
And the insights don't stop when you get a little smaller: South Korea, Ireland, and Uruguay superimposed above my state of Ohio, four hours drive diagonally-across. Via https://thetruesize.com
We've been thinking a LOT about how casually our perspectives get parochial as kids, as we design our kids' homeschool curricula and this is just underscoring the point.
Via https://thetruesize.com — Australia, Brazil, and Canada rotated various ways & superimposed on continental USA. And Japan off the east coast.
We need more things like this. Globes are great, but we need globes with removable stickers, like this.
😍
#Maps matter.
Australia is as big as continental USA.
Africa is bigger than USA+China+India.
As a child growing up exposed to big Mercator maps, I thought Muslims in America should face east-south-east to pray towards Mecca. Then years later my mom showed me this app that said… east-NORTH-east??? Got down the globe and… mind blown. Thanks shit maps.
So when I see Web Mercator ruling the world, I 🤮 in my mouth. Cesiumjs.org 4 eva!
I've waited twenty years for this. #GIS FTW
(Hopefully I won't need to wait another twenty for them to add historic empires, Mongol, Tang, Qing, Arab, Alexandrine, Achemenid, etc.)
It’s probably safe to admit to this now, but I visited Totto #Ramen 🍜 (鳥人: bird person) in #Manhattan, in New York City, and it was amazing. I don’t announce my travel plans so I can’t get suggestions from the Fediverse but almost 5000 Yelp people gave it an average of four ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️, and after that buildup, it delivered. It was fun waiting outside the shop for twenty minutes in the early afternoon, after giving the coat-clad waitress my order, since it only seats maybe twenty inside! ごちそうさま‼️
Have all y’all seen the JSON viewer in Firefox⁇ It’s brilliant (and not in Chrome).
The data is from https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/metrics/edits/aggregate/en.wikipedia/all-editor-types/all-page-types/daily/20180225/20180321
Saw this photo of Saudi prince Mohd. b. Salman being received by the Heisei emperor, in his Tokyo office, from a couple of years ago, and I'm just thinking about that Arabic↔︎Japanese translator! How much practice does he get, how does he stay in shape, what his practice regimen is, etc. (Others have noted the sparse Japanese aesthetic, which Alex Kerr discusses at length in his *Kyoto* book.) https://octodon.social/media/QIGgwG0HwNEud3fDn_A
I may have acquired some new glass. With it I acquired this photo of a house finch. His spouse was dining with him on the other side of the feeder. #SpringHasArrived. https://octodon.social/media/4vZ6QvKQLpeFxna72lI
Code senpai at work just merged my commit weighing in at 100kloc of whitespace changes caused by running #clang-format on our main C++ repo. Omg such win. Especially since it took a week to go from "hey what about this?" to "looks good", no flamesuits needed. https://octodon.social/media/fNvSPoYrivSY2H6xntc
One of these is not like the rest…
This is the list of top-15 viewed English Wikipedia articles in December 2017:https://tools.wmflabs.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&date=last-month&excludes=
Number 6 has me completely befuddled.
(Looking into this because I want to try my hand at establishing VaR (value-at-risk) measures with Wikipedia, e.g., number of daily edits, views, for different languages, etc., a la Aaron Brown.)
Reconstructions of national treasures (at #平等院, #ByodoIn, in #Uji, outside #Kyoto) are so important in conveying the brilliance of the art, and the effect they must have had on visitors a thousand years ago. These pieces are in the famous Phoenix Hall, #鳳凰堂, a thousand year old wood temple.
https://octodon.social/media/RGHmpn5F5sI0PEhx7oI https://octodon.social/media/rCF1cBWeBWHG0yy7RI8
Some here might appreciate my family's syncretic Xmas tree decoration aesthetic. (1) Tengu, (2) pooping Nara deer, (3) kitsune (fox), (4) Koro, from Studio Ghibli's 2002 short, *Koro's Big Day Out* (shown only at the Ghibli Museum).
https://octodon.social/media/hJeKXVj8GBSdRwXBmo0 https://octodon.social/media/A9z8F1LrIDtjjm_ieAc https://octodon.social/media/SRdEGcATsXD4bxYgO_E https://octodon.social/media/VEWG7_u2SPl3HoY45Q0
One of these is not like the rest… “There is a spy among us” say the camels, the pigs, the hippos, the deer, the cows, the rhinos 😂
http://www.onezoom.org/life/@Cetartiodactyla=622916?vis=spiral#x551,y457,w0.8787
(The photos are taken as representative of potentially several species, so do browse! #Biology wins.)
My treasure. #PorcoRosso wristwatch, from the #Ghibli store in Osaka.
https://octodon.social/media/BD6_hrEjZu_JSjdtRo8
Where I want to be: green/orange.
Where I don't want to be: blue.
Where I am: blue.
(Real-time temperature visualization via https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic)
The glitzy eighties gave way to the terrible nineties:
“in the early twenty-first century in a climate of almost palpable despair, the belief that ruination lay just around the corner.”
