Apple denies that its correct name is Apple, Inc. The correct name of Respondent is Apple Inc.
Using Credit Cards to Target Web Ads →
The two largest credit-card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., are pushing into a new business: using what they know about people's credit-card purchases for targeting them with ads online.
Over my dead body.
MasterCard doesn't collect people's names or addresses when processing credit-card transactions. That makes it tricky to directly link people's card activity to their online profiles, ad executives said. The company's document describes its "extensive experience" linking "anonymized purchased attributes to consumer names and addresses" with the help of third-party companies.
"Extensive experience", huh. That's not worrisome.
The trove of details about people's credit-card activity would be a gold mine, ad executives say, because it illuminates a person's budget, where they shop, what they buy and how they spend their time. "The combination of actual purchase behavior with attitudinal and demographic information provides an unparalleled understanding of the consumer," MasterCard's document says.
Unparalleled and downright scary. The whole article is full of other statements that are frightening.
Crafting the Blue Marble →
I had no idea until reading this post that the image was Photoshopped together with tens of thousands of satellite photos and used texturing and 3D rendering. Awesome.
Pendulum Waves →
How it works: The period of one complete cycle of the dance is 60 seconds. The length of the longest pendulum has been adjusted so that it executes 51 oscillations in this 60 second period. The length of each successive shorter pendulum is carefully adjusted so that it executes one additional oscillation in this period. Thus, the 15th pendulum (shortest) undergoes 65 oscillations. When all 15 pendulums are started together, they quickly fall out of sync—their relative phases continuously change because of their different periods of oscillation. However, after 60 seconds they will all have executed an integral number of oscillations and be back in sync again at that instant, ready to repeat the dance.I don't know about a dance, but it's something mesmerizing. I want one.
Great marketing. More like this, please.
(via WinRumors)
The HTML specification integrates the SVG and MathML grammars, and as part of that, HTML adopts all the named character entities including ∳ and !
— HTML Parsing with JavaScript
"InvisibleComma". How cute.
Happy Halloween!
Beauty in mathematics, in this case, polynomial roots. (via This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 285))
Google Puts a Price on Privacy →
Sean Sperte reflecting on the recent changes to Google searches:
It means, though, that Google's privacy policies are being dictated by money. That can't be a good thing.It was a matter of time.
You can be mad at someone who learned how to make the system work exceptionally well for them, but should you get pissed at the system for not paying attention when people circumvent it. That is: should we be mad at Wall Street for doing their jobs exceptionally well, or mad at the governments for doing their jobs exceptionally poor?