This is what the notoriously disorganized Burning Man festival looks like from space. Pretty organized, actually. Picture by DigitalGlobe, via news.discovery.com.
Category: Everything
New year, new address(es)
Recently, I decided that it was time for this blog to have a “real” web address, so as of last month, it lives at www.rensecorten.org. The old address will still work, but…
Plotting reactions to Bin Laden’s death
The New York Times’ website has a really cool interactive feature in which you can indicate your own opinion on Osama Bin Laden’s demise on a two-dimensional plot, and simultaneously see other…
Posting to Evernote from Vim
Since some time I’ve been using Evernote to capture and collect notes and ideas, and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. One of my few complaints is that its built-in…
A beautiful swarm
A fantastic video of an unusually large swarm of about 60,000 starlings, spotted this week over Utrecht, the Netherlands. Watching the swarm move around is almost hypnotizing . Notice the falcon flying…
One for all
The events in Tunisia and Egypt remind me of Russell Hardin’s book One for all, in which he analyzes collective action as mainly a problem of coordination. When he discusses revolutions, Hardin…
Financial risk in banking networks
Today’s issue of Nature has an interesting article by Andrew G. Haldane and Robert M. May in which the “network lens” (as they call it) is applied to financial risks and instability…
Observations on the Sunbelt 2010
I just returned from the Sunbelt conference in Riva del Garda, Italy, where I presented my paper with Andrea Knecht on alcohol use as a coordination game, and Michal presented our paper…