Open Kamer

Open Kamer is een nieuwe website die inzicht geeft in het handelen van de Tweede Kamer.

Wetsvoorstellen worden als tijdlijn weergegeven waarin alle bijbehorende documenten, besluiten, moties, amendementen en stemmingsuitslagen in chronologische volgorde zichtbaar zijn.

Een voorbeeld is het wetsvoorstel over orgaandonatie: https://www.openkamer.org/dossier/tijdlijn/33506/

Open Kamer (openkamer.org) is gebaseerd op het gelijknamige open source project openkamer.

Global Climate Maps

"Climatemaps visualizes the weather over the course of a year around the whole world. The map animates average global monthly climate data from 1961-1990 to show you when every location in the world has its hottest, driest or wettest weather." - http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.nl/2016/08/annual-weather-patterns.html#links

One-Minute Time Machine

Capitalism explained with two cows

Amazing 0g music video

This music video by OK Go was shot during 0g flights and cleverly edited together. Couldn't embed the video because Facebook sucks, but do go and see it.

Here's more about how it was made.

Big Motherfucking Thing projection mapped

One of the biggest projection mapping displays ever.

Just discovered you can take '3D' pictures with Google Camera

Depthy extracts the depth map made by Google Camera Lens Blur photos allowing you to view them with a 3D parallax effect and changing of focus.

The picture in the post is just a shitty GIF export, it's way more awesome to play around with it yourself. Here is an example I made. Be sure to check out all the options in the settings.

Here is the Depthmap generated by the software, pretty impressive.

Google is now applying this tech to allow you to make 3D panoramas to view in Cardboard/VR: https://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2015/12/step-inside-your-photos-with-cardboard.html

I guess it's just a matter of time before we can get miniature drones that use this to automatically capture whole scenes in full 3D for you.

Stichting Full Reserve - DepositoBank

"Het nemen van risico zou een keuze moeten zijn. Wie geld giraal -dus op een bankrekening- wil aanhouden, kon tot nu toe niet kiezen voor een bank die geen risico neemt door het verstrekken van leningen. Straks wel."

Stichting Full Reserve probeert een bank op te richting zonder winstoogmerk en zonder geldschepping. Daarvoor zijn 16000 oprichters (leden) nodig. 

Het lijkt me mooi als een dergelijke bank er komt. Vreemd dat we die mogelijkheid nu niet hebben.

www.depositobank.nl

meldpunt.fietsersbond.nl

The fietsersbond is, in my experience, a very active and effective organisation that campaigns for better cycling conditions in the Netherlands.

They have a webapp, meldpunt.fietsersbond.nl, where you can report any issue related to cycle lanes and cycling infrastructure. Anything from glass or dirt on the road, to dangerous situations. Reports are usually (automatically) forwarded to local authorities. I have good experience with actions taken after filing a report.

The fietsersbond has only 35,000 members (compared to 4,100,000 for the ANWB).
Please consider joining the bond, lid.fietsersbond.nl. Membership starts at 26 euro per year.

We're on the cusp of a revolution that will change the world as much as computers did

Most people do not yet understand the potential impact of our newfound ability to edit and eventually rewrite genetic code, the blueprint for life itself.
At least, so say a number a number of experts in genetics and genomics. That idea was the major common thread in a series of interviews with some of the leading researchers in the field.

Full article... 

Please read the article so you are not 'most people'. I also truly believe this will be big. This is the technology that allows a gene drive that could exterminate a mosquito species for example.

Podcast: startup

I follow he podcast Startup a while, see link

This is a podcast about someone who wants to start podcast company. You follow his startup from the start and see where he bumps into. The podcast has high production value and gives in my opinion also a fairly accurate picture of what it is to start a startup.

Tip 1: Listen to the podcasts chronologically.

Tip 2: Season two is not as great as season one, but the mini season 3 starts very well.

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months

I think this is the world record.

In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him – for 438 days. This is his story

Full story @ The Guardian.

Rare weather event causes stunning ‘fire rainbow cloud’ to appear

Pretty spectacular example of cloud iridescence.

Article and video

Nice ones I found on Flickr: (FFS you need a Yahoo account to download pics there nowadays)

Heliumbeer, best thing since sliced bread.

My personality according to IBM Watson Personality Insights

I inputted a total of nearly 6000 words of my own original writing from my longer Reddit submissions to /r/futurology and dream report on my website. It seems like a pretty good result to me and gives way more insight than any four letter Myers-Briggs personality test (i.e. INTJ) I've taken before. Though I do spot some huge misses too, like Curiosity 31%?

I'm gonna try and compare it with inputting my MSc thesis next. I'm guessing there will be quite some difference. Maybe not, according to the research you need self reflective words and it was trained on social media such as twitter, blog posts, and forum posts. Makes sense. Gonna be harder to pull another 6000 words out of the Reddit hat.

You can try it for yourself here.
.

IBM Watson advert: Bob Dylan & IBM Watson on Language

Now that there are advertisements rolling out I hope we might finally start seeing some results from Watson too, I've been waiting long enough, with growing skepticism.

About Watson singing, I made him sing a Reggie Watts song some time ago, think it worked out okay :)

 

Europe's highest court rejected the 'safe harbor' agreement used by American tech companies

"The European Court of Justice has just ruled that the transatlantic Safe Harbour agreement, which lets American companies use a single standard for consumer privacy and data storage in both the US and Europe, is invalid.
...
Companies such as Facebook and Twitter may now face scrutiny from individual European countries' data regulators — and could be forced to host European user data in Europe, rather than hosting it in the US and transferring it over."

read more...

Carebear internals

Artist website

A nice list with more of his sculptures

Would love to get one of those sculptures :)

K2: The Killer Summit

Low quality youtube link here. There is also a 720p torrent out there (highly recommended because of the scenery), should I post the link or are we then endangering the blog?

I found this documentary quite fascinating although it doesn't really teach anything, it only tells the story of the most lethal day in the history of K2 using rather good re-enactments and stunning images of the landscape.

ps. I've slightly adjusted the width of the blog so that embedded clips have a better fit when set on 640x360.

The Egg - probably my favorite 5 minute read

The Egg

By: Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

  Full story...

Andy Weir also wrote The Martian which is one of my favorite hard sci-fi books and is currently being made into a movie. I read the book due to Adam Savage recommending it in a Tested video.