Flow of Light: Archive

Apr 24th

Apr 22nd

1 tag

Pi

Coincidence? Write out the alphabet starting with J: JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHI Erase all letters that have left-right symmetry (such as A) and count the letters in each of the five groups that remain. (via: futilitycloset.com)

Sep 8th

Delete.

Aug 15th

Sheeple

Yep, this is probably what everyone is thinking sitting on the Tube in London… (xkcd.com)

Jul 21st

Jul 8th

1 tag

G20 sentiment

Walking through Trafalgar Square in London last Wednesday, the day before the G20 protests, I watched this guy start to assemble this with copper coins. I came back an hour or so later and it was clear he really wanted to emphasise the word ‘crime’. I wonder what would have happened if someone just kicked it over? Other protest gems that stuck out: - Man dressed in suit waving...

Apr 4th

1 tag

Vacheron Constantin calibre 1400

Love this proprietary hand-wound mechanical movement:

Mar 22nd

2 tags

Flash/ActionScript

Very cool face-tracking + 3D scene. Flash has come a long way since I started tinkering with it 10 years ago… amazing what people do with it.

Mar 20th

1 tag

Zero-knowledge environment for cloud storage

“SpiderOak provides innovative virtual personal network services that simplify the process of backing up, accessing, organizing, sharing and synchronizing data from any number of computers or external storage media. The company is the first to offer the ‘SuperCloud’ - protecting a user against data loss, making all stored information available 24x7 from any Internet connected...

Mar 13th

1 tag

How do you value British banks?

Looking at this table’s perspective (equity per share, discounted valuation, current price) implies ~40% probability of survival for RBS, BARC and LLOY. i.e. not a great chance of avoiding wipeout of equity holders through nationalisation. And this is before this morning’s down-slide!

Mar 9th

1 tag

Mar 7th

1 tag

Introduction to Black Holes

Newtonian physics versus relativity! 44 minutes of astronomy fun. Love it.

Mar 6th

1 tag

Mar 5th

1 tag

BoE cuts rates by 50bps to 0.5%...

…along with £75bn of quantitative easing which is expected to increase M4 money supply by 3.5%. And so it begins. Here’s a nice table from Dresdner:

Mar 5th

1 tag

Educate yourself!

At Academic Earth, Ivy League professors lecture on topics like the financial crisis, climate change, the human brain, international politics, and astrophysics (for the real nerds). Just played a few video lectures, some very interesting topics. Found the site to have a very accessible and crisp UI which makes the world of difference to the user experience. Here’s a short clip about...

Mar 5th

1 tag

Biblio-Text: West End Lane Books

Mental note to pop in here more often - it’s only around the corner. What kinds of books do you sell and why? Owner Graeme Estry: “We are a local community independent, and take pride in serving our community as closely as possible. Therefore the bookshop is the result of a 15 year dialogue with the community, and they tend to want an intelligent and literary general stock, more...

Mar 4th

Calendar comet

Hmm, so there are nine of these square root days each century - today is one of them… and the next one is in 7 years.

Mar 3rd

1 tag

Mar 2nd

67 notes

UNIX time since...

…the UNIX epoch will be 1234567890 at 23:31:30 GMT today (Fri 13 Feb 2009).

Feb 13th

1 tag

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

– Keynes

Feb 10th

http://www.lovelycharts.com - not bad at all for a free flash app, simple and intuitive and just what I need.

Feb 9th

1 tag

Twitter

(via aja) Got to stage 1 in Dec 06 just before I left Tokyo. Succumbed to stage 2 in Jun 08 (@flowoflight) after seeing an exponential increase in users and thought that there must be something in it. There should be a stage 2A, where tweeting is just a means of logging personal things you find interesting or significant. Well that’s what I’m doing (for now). Twitter can be many...

Feb 9th

TfL

This warrants a note for posterity. So the Central line was screwed at rush hour this evening and I wanted to go from Bank to Oxford Street. Bank tube was jammed (severe delays, usual mumble), so I re-surfaced and went to the nearest bus-stop on King William Street. Looked at the sign and there was a TfL info line (0207 code as well), so I called it expecting to be on hold and/or not get...

Feb 5th

That’s just great. No tube, bus or train services. London has all but shut down due to mad snow.

Feb 2nd

Symmetry

An even distribution of LOVE: (via: futilitycloset)

Jan 27th

Jan 25th

50 notes

MGMT - Kids (Pet Shop Boys Synthpop Mix) (via:...

Dec 23rd

56 notes

London Evening Standard - “Christmas cards are the veriform appendix of communication: a right pain but completely and utterly useless.”

Dec 19th

Love to hate the Tube

Tired of your old Oyster card holder? Check out Bad Oyster… Yep.

Dec 2nd

1 tag

The "PRDC menace" as USDJPY breaches 95

FT.com / UK “But just as deleveraging has created domino effects in numerous other asset classes, there are signs that volatility in the foreign exchange markets is starting to affect PRDC trades.” Yeah, you reckon. And Mrs Watanabe is stuck with 30y jpy zeroes. Also, The Times UK had this to say recently: “The products, which are known as power reverse dual currency notes...

Nov 26th

Hailstoning outside - winter’s arrived in London. Another good excuse for a phat cheeseburger lunch at GBK.

Nov 24th

Random observation: why do Rock & Republic jeans cost GBP 250 in London and USD 250 in NYC?

Nov 21st

Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar

Damn, if there ever was another reason to head back to NYC again. The Volcano: Imagine the most delicious knish ever, filled with potato gratin, gruyere cheese, and Benton’s bacon. ‘Nuff said. Pork and Egg Bun: Another excuse for Chang to gild the pork bun lily with a deep fried soft poached egg. The candy bar pie has toffee, housemade nougat, and a chocolate cookie crust....

Nov 21st

Oxford compiles list of top ten irritating phrases... →

Oh yes indeed.

Nov 11th

2 tags

Pro glass Nikkor

Ever since the early days starting off on a Nikon F65 with 28-100mm FX, glass has progressively become more important in my mind. Along came a new D70s and I used the 18-70mm kit lens (and other glass) for a while but ditched it in favour of the 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 VR DX which was released in 2005 and this became my sole walkabout workhorse. Instead of swapping multiple lenses, I had pretty much the...

Nov 9th

BoE cuts rates by 150bps!

Nov 6th

Oct 25th

Asian rout! Usdjpy has dropped a few big figures the last I checked and Nikkei closes down nearly 10%. One word: x-gamma.

Oct 24th

Might be time to get a new BTO MBP.

Oct 22nd

WTI vol skewed to the downside?

Hmm, pretty bearish, if OPEC does slash production this week as expected…

Oct 22nd

Saegreifinn lobster soup and Baejarins Betzu hotdog for lunch. And then tasting menu dinner at Perlan. Awesome.

Oct 10th

SMS to Twitter to Blog.

Oct 9th

The universe is a hack.

Oct 9th

“HM Treasury to stock market: “We stand ready to bail out banks.” Market to HM...”

Oct 7th

Monkey madness

This is why I miss Tokyo. The craziness of it all.

Oct 7th