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My two favourite detective series are:

- Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr (March Violets is the first) - Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis (The Silver Pigs is the first)

They may be a little noirish for your tastes (more focused on character and society) but I loved the detailed historical settings and the level of depth to the detective characters. They're also both still propelled by a mystery / solving a crime.


The UK CEO presented some of their different data capabilities at the agency where I used to work: they were encouraging advertisers to use this data to soundtrack ads.

The different 'shazam'd songs were also connected to locations and user demographics so if you wanted a track that was going to be big in a specific community you could get a good guess.


In fact, those mistakes look more like accurate transcriptions of Early Modern manuscripts - with their looser spelling rules and often idiosyncratic use of letters.

It's kind of interesting that they look like the same errors as those generated by OCR.

The difficulty of deciphering the text makes this huge task even more impressive!


It's precisely those idiosyncrasies of early modern orthography which make it difficult to use an off-the-shelf OCR package, which is presumably why these are hand-transcribed instead.

Perhaps there is a specialist antiquarian OCR package which can deal with long s, interchangeable u and v, non-standardised spelling, etc, but I have yet to come across one.


Have you looked at The Early Modern OCR project? My understanding is that they're working on exactly that as well as simply better tools for reviewing & retraining on a large scale:

http://emop.tamu.edu/


No, I hadn't, and am grateful for the link - thank you!


If you're interested in the history of Rinse.fm, check out this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/aug/27/rinse-fm-geeneu...

Real Pirate radio for the last twenty years.


Rinse has an FM license now, so they've gone from pirate to legit. It was funny listening to the DJs trying to curb their swearing (50 pound fine per naughty word) in the weeks after they were licensed.


I think that off-piste skiing shares the same immersive flow-like experience whilst also being a physical activity.

It's the combination of feedback, decision making and then successful completion of the challenge that really combines to create the feeling.

Thinking of the problem, planning your response, and then executing in quick succession repeatedly.


Yes. Climbing, too. And there seem to be a surprising number of climbers who are also programmers, so it seems to me there's something similar in the nature of the two activities.


This is surprisingly close. I'd never thought of it like this but it's immediately clear what you mean.

Especially if it's off-piste but an area that you're familiar with. You plan out your run multiple steps before you start, and once you're on the hill you have to be flexible enough to change course and replan on the fly for another multiple steps ahead, all while you're barreling down a hill.

And then there's the moments of sheer terror when you see snow sliding past you, or when you come up on a recent avalanche 1) have to avoid the packed ice and 2) look out for what caused the avalanche.

You're absolutely right - I get a kind of rush from coding that's similar to skiing off-piste. Not quite the same but not as different as one would think.


I think that your exception for Doodle's case is also applicable to this use case and many more: if you're creating a predict-a-score league with your friends, you're going to have to share it immediately.


This can be seen by all of these maps of around this period that are made by Dutch/English/German cartographers that don't show California as an Island, including Munster's very popular one:

http://www.ianchadwick.com/hudson/other_maps.htm


This looks nice, although I agree that I would find the scrolling difficult to put up with.

An alternative, focused on travel mainly: http://maptia.com/maptia/stories/the-overview-effect


My travel documentation is incredibly fragmented between direct emails to family, photos on my phone, dslr photos, blog posts, tweets, facebook posts/albums, etc...

I like the idea of Maptia for aggregating all that into one place, but because of uploading everything everywhere for so long, I really want a solution on my own server and attached to my own domain.


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