Macdrifter

Chatology by Flexibits [Link]

2013-06-19T07:30:00-04:00

What do you get when the makers of Fantastical get frustrated with iMessage's lack of real search? You get Chatology. It almost makes iMessage not suck. I wish I had a conversation in iMessage appropriate for screenshots. It's nice.

How Does Location Influence Beer Ratings [Link]

2013-06-19T07:15:00-04:00

I love BeerGraphs because it is about two of my favorite things: Beer and data visualization. This latest post digs into the Untappd location data:

We use the geolocation data to calculate the distance between the beer rater and the brewery where the beer was produced and then store that number in our database. To my surprise, ratings that were made at or within 10 miles of the brewery received slightly below-average scores (3.17). Once you get more than 10 miles away from the brewery, the average rating jumps up to 3.26. This level is roughly maintained up to a distance of 500 miles from the brewery, after which it sees a sharp decline all the way to 3.04 (750-1250 miles from the brewery). Lastly, check-ins more than 2000 miles from the brewery actually had the highest rating of any distance group (3.29).

Persuading David Simon [Link]

2013-06-19T07:00:00-04:00

That Maciej guy is super smart and very reasonable. This is how I want to argue on the internet.

But Simon is not a fogey who doesn't understand how powerful computers have become (though I feel that there are such people in positions of oversight in the House and Senate). I believe his error is in assuming that the analysis of these 'computer-runs' is any kind of bottleneck. There are powerful techniques for surfacing interesting features in any comprehensive list of interactions between human beings. I've written in the past about my distaste for the 'social graph' and the perverse worldview it imposes on our projects, but part of the appeal of that worldview is the real power of mathematics applied to exactly this kind of data. The analysis can be automated, and no good comes of it.

Regardless of your opinions or interests, this is perhaps one of the most well reasoned opinions about data collection I've read.

SkyMall's Economics [Link]

2013-06-18T07:00:00-04:00

PriceOnomics has a great investigative article about the ubiquitous and elusive SkyMall. They dig into their new business model and find some interesting changes. Spoiler: It's about as crumby as the crap they sell.

By way of Marcelo Somers.

iOS Fonts [Link]

2013-06-17T07:47:00-04:00

As the name implies, a bunch of fonts on iOS. Search by iOS version and preview your own text. This works best when viewed from an iOS device.

By way of someone on Twitter. Sorry, lost the link.