Another Blog Transition

For the latest from brian, visit brian.copeland.bz

It's 2015 and I'm up for posting new content about myself. But Alicia's sold me on Wordpress (it just looks so much sexier!) and I'm sick of splitting my content between work and casual. No one wants to visit two blogs by one guy.

So head over to brian.copeland.bz for the most current blog about me. This blog (my professional one) has transitioned to the blogger hosted address briancopeland1.blogspot.com.

See ya there?

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.

DataViz!

Just a quick note to brag, Target's been holding a Data Visualization challenge. They provide the data, you go and make with the pretty and insightful. My team? Top 4 of 17 submissions. We're presenting at the big event tomorrow.

As a result, I'm pretty high on data-viz right now, feeling like a pro. Then I stumble upon something like this:

Color Names by Gender

Man, it has everything. It's interactive in all the right ways. The scatter plot is the perfect way to display the gender differences and the sorting buttons at the bottom are the icing on the cake. 

Oh well, I'll keep tryin' and aspirin'.

The Strictest Password Policy (that I've ever seen)

Check out this list of rules for a password:

· Password must not contain the following characters: @&$"
· Password must contain at least 1 special characters.
· Password must contain at least 2 unique characters.
· Password must contain at least 1 lowercase letters.
· Password must contain at least 1 numeric characters.
· Password must be at least 8 characters long.
· Password must contain at least 2 alphabetic characters.
· Password must contain at least 1 alphanumeric characters.
· Password change reminder will be sent 80 days after the last password change.
· Password will expire 90 days after the last password change.
· Password must contain at least 1 uppercase letters.
· Password must not be one of 10 previous passwords.

No joke, this was the list of rules for a server at a previous employer. Apparently, alphanumeric and numeric characters are totally different. Not only do you have to have at least 1 uppercase letter and one lowercase letter, you need two alphabetic characters. Whoa.

Granted, it's probably not the strictest policy in the world - I mean, that's some serious overlap - but man it was crazy to see in production.

Being Called Smart

Scientific studies have shown that you can destroy a child by calling them "smart." Even when they're very young, little kids know that being "smart" is what makes them special - and so, the first time they encounter something they don't understand immediately, it's a threat. Their specialness is in danger of being stripped away. And if they lose that smartness, then what are they? 

- Taken from "The Watchtower of Destruction"

There's fewer things I've related to more than this article. Most of the mistakes made in my life were because of things outlined in this article. I took Advanced English in High School only because the smart kids were taking it. I didn't even like English class, but I _had_ to take English, since that's what smart people did and I was smart. 

So there I am, Advanced English in tenth grade. I was among all the smart people, time to show off, right? Nope. I did no homework. Absolutely zero. I just slid by with the confident knowledge that "well, if I did the homework, I'd definitely would have gotten an A." 

Oh well. 

One thing this article links up with really well is with Louis C. K.'s speech in honor of George Carlin:

Motivated yet?

Avoiding Procrastination

Thought this was especially nice. Hurray for mind maps, too.

Cleaning out my bookmarks

Going through my bookmarks, thought it'd be a good time to post some relevant content. Head's up!

PPT Template... Company or others?

Powerpoint came up tonight while at home during the dark Minnesota winter evenings. The wife asked me:

"Is it wrong to suggest a Powerpoint presentation at work should be using the company template?"

I've actually been thinking about that a lot lately, as Powerpoint presentations are just so nice for facilitating a meeting. Is it alright to deviate from the proscribed company template at work? Does it depend on the presentation?

Nothing against the OptumInsight template, it's very nicely crafted. But having seen the same template used for a 1.5+ years, it's wearing thin. Combine that with the fact that Microsoft has some oh-so-pretty templates ready to go and prepacked in Powerpoint, I've got admit, I've started deviating. 

Liveblogging!

Just a note to mention that I'm live blogging SAS Global Conference on my twitter feed @briancopeland