Escher's Hand with Reflecting Sphere

Check out this link from reddit.com/r/internetisbeautiful. 

The creator unprojected Escher's "Hand with Reflecting Sphere" onto a 3D environment, then put the ball in the center as a demo for three.js. I don't know about you, but that's the kind of thing any career needs - little bit of creativity, little bit of math, and a lot of awesome.

Visualizing Gender Break Out by Profession

538 used Census data to show the gender breakout by profession. Very good! Let me excerpt the most important parts:

The patterns are pretty obvious to me, which is the sign of a good info-graphic. To anticipate a few of your questions:

• Yes, drillers of earth is the most awesome job you've ever heard of.
• A boilermaker fabricates steel plates
• Turns out that @BeckerMN is part of the 2.3% 

Geek vs. Nerd

I disagree with how often the terms "nerd" and "geek" are self-applied, but I have to appreciate a good study of their difference when I see one.

Burr Settles defines the difference:

"The distinction is that geeks are fans of their subjects, and nerds are practitioners of them."

...then uses Twitter data to back his assertion up by calculating the "point-wise mutual information" of nerd and geek with other words to illuminate what Twitter thinks is "geeky" or "nerdy".

"Moving up the vertical axis, words become more geeky (“#music” → “#gadget” → “#cosplay”), and moving left to right they become more nerdy (“education” → “grammar” → “neuroscience”). Words along the diagonal are similarly geeky and nerdy, including social (“#awkward”, “weirdo”), mainstream tech (“#computers”, “#microsoft”), and sci-fi/fantasy terms (“doctorwho,” “#thehobbit”)." 

 Find the full article on the Slackpropagation blog - definitely click through to read more of his conclusions.

Life in Weeks

Had a decent visualization of life forwarded today:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

Be warned, the second half of the article gets a little preachy and motivational. But the grid view of weeks in a typical human's life is awesome:

Source: What But Why

I'm marveling at the simplicity. The KISS principle in action, I'd say.

Fantastic Report

Ars Technica recently posted a study on PC Game Sales:

Right now, I can tell you that about 37 percent of the roughly 781 million games registered to various Steam accounts haven’t even been loaded a single time. I can tell you that Steam users have put an aggregate of about 3.8 billion hours into Dota 2.

Essentially, they found a way to systematically sample the profile pages of all Steam users, scraping games in library + hours played:

[We] scrape through more than a 100,000 pages a day. Using our knowledge of the Steam Community ID structure (and some light PHP/MySQL coding), we’ve been conducting what amounts to a rolling, randomized poll of the Steam user universe for about two months now. 

Just exactly the kind of thing I enjoy. The article goes on to describe their findings, the risks, and key insights their data scraping provides. I know I'll be bookmarking it as a guideline for my next project - both at work and in my personal "futzing" around.