Archive of posts from 2017
Complex actions need specialized interfaces
Yesterday I was in a room with a Bloomberg terminal. Bloomberg is specialized software used by financial professionals to navigate data and take actions. Users interact with the system through a specialized keyboard that looks like this:
Contributing to pandas
Very proud to announce today that I had a pull request merged into the pandas library. In version 0.21, pandas will have a new feature: a way to read in line-delimited JSON in small pieces, which can be useful when working with large files or streams.
What I've been reading lately
Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows. Solnit is a marvelous thinker and historian who moves smoothly between well-researched historical fact and philosophical reverie. Here she traces the life of Edward Muybridge whose motion studies of animals are still familiar today. Muybridge was a first-class photographer, a true artist who also made many technical innovations. Solnit takes his collaboration with Leland Stanford as the jumping-off point for an exploration of the way technology has annihilated time and space, and develops a genealogy from those two to the California of today, dominated by Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In her telling, these two industries named for physical places are at the center of a world that, in large part because of their doing, is increasingly disconnected from the world itself.
Nitt Witt Ridge
Art Beal spent 61 years building a house out of found materials at Nitt Witt Ridge in Cambria, CA. He served for a time as the town garbageman, dumping his truck directly into his own backyard and rummaging for salvageable building supplies with which he slowly built a house in the shape of his own mind. There is now little trace of the 20 feet of landfill underneath the hill. where his house rests.
USAFacts, Corporate Hagiography and Historical Ignorance
This morning my circles are talking about Steve Ballmer’s new government data initiative USAFacts as reported in this NYT article.
Python tip: Inspect function signature at runtime
Problem:
Book Review | Earthseed Series | Octavia Butler
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
Book Review | The Whale | Philip Hoare
_The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea _by Philip Hoare