Naked Data

All the data you can eat

Finally

Happy birthday, Wikipedia

It was 20 years ago today, Jimmy Wales taught the band to play. The band being the internet, and the song being Wikipedia, of course. You may not have seen much coverage of this noteworthy anniversary locally - although internationally the site that killed Encarta is much celebrated. That's partl...

6 days ago

Scotland’s snowplows have the best names

Scotland's road gritters might sound like tough machines, clearing snow and icing roads, but they have the best names: Gangsta Granny Gritter, Ready Spready Go, For Your Ice Only, License to Chill, and Spready Mercury, amongst others. There's also a great map to track them here.

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

The serious Empire

You don't have to read Cicero to know that the Ancient Romans gave us so many popular words and phrases relating to the sentiment of the crowd which are still in use today. But how did they really feel about life? Abishek Verma has done some sentiment analysis on everyday writings of Roman people...

a month ago

Pollster: It’s not us, it’s you

Another election, another disaster for pollsters who could have done better predicting from the swoop of the swallows than the responses from the American public. But the problem isn't the pollsters, claims chief Haruspex at Ntrailz, Matthew Dessem: it's us. We just didn't understand the prophets...

Jason Norwood-Young

2 months ago

Revisiting old friends

Over at Information is Beautiful, David McCandless has gone back to the principles (if not the actual technique) of his famous Snake Oil Supplements viz to take a look at research around Vitamin D (and in particular its as-yet unproven value in the War Against Covid). The result? Informative as e...

2 months ago

Is there anybody out there?

Not since Sam Neill was on moon duty has Australian astronomy blessed with the world with such a moment of joy. Voyager 2 is back online and broadcasting from beyond the edges of our galaxy, thanks to an upgrade to a 47-year-old radio antenna in Canberra.

2 months ago

Mushrooms and sake

Despite growing up in the country, in a land most moist and full of fungi, everything I know about mushrooms I learned from playing Elder Scrolls games. Beyond healing potions, I have no idea what a Fly Amanita might taste like or if it can kill you with its spores. There are about three words I ...

2 months ago

Jaws 2 (heads)

A shark with two heads might be the stuff of nightmares for those raised in the ignorant era of the nascent blaockbuster. But this one is, frankly, adorable, and you certainly won't be needing a bigger boat. https://twitter.com/akshay_journo/status/1315620615525556230

2 months ago

Take it with a grain of salt

Or two thirds of a piece of beach sand, three pieces of pollen, ten bits of phlegm or 100 coronavirii. It's Visual Capitalist's guide to The Relative Size of Particles - a close up view of how these things all compare.

3 months ago

Zoom in, enhance

Deep fake video ads may be scaring the American electorate (but then what doesn't), but researchers at Microsoft has put image-fiddling AI to a more homely use. They've published a paper all about restoring old photos with algorithms that eliminate tears and give colours an appropriate boost. Rea...

3 months ago

Bring back the 8-track

One story doing the rounds this week has been the news that sales of vinyl records have outperformed CDs for the first time since the 1980s. I was quite surprised to hear it being being covered on the local radio news here in SA. Surprised for a few reasons because a) this isn't a new story, b) i...

4 months ago

Can you skin a dog with a knife made of frozen poo?

Apparently you cannot, as team of winners at this year's Ig Nobel prizes for research have proved beyond doubt. Also making the list is the paper that suggests many etymologists are afraid of spiders, and that poor people snog more than the rich. Check out the full list here. We repeated the expe...

4 months ago

The drinking habits of the South African

Two-thirds of South Africans won't have missed booze during the long dry months of prohibition. So says fact-checking site Africa Check which backed up health minister Zweli Mkhezi's claim that only 31% of locals drink this week. The minority of those who do partake in a dram or two more than mak...

4 months ago

In it for the long haul

It's an innocuous looking graph posted to Reddit's Data is Beautiful boards about airport tarmac to most, but to others (like us) it raises a curious question: why does Uppington (pop 74,000) in the Northern Cape have one of the longest runways in the world? For non-locals, Uppington is best desc...

4 months ago

Crystalising history to repeat itself

It might sound like one of the more repeatable plotlines from Dr Who, but we couldn't let this one go by without comment. Scientists from a multinational team based in the UK, US and Finland have used supercooled helium to observe - for the first time - the interaction between one of nature's wei...

5 months ago

Hooked on the sweet stuff

After the great vitamin C science debacle, in which the citric compound found its way - erroneously - in to the hive mind as a cure for the common cold, you might be sceptical about the latest claim from researchers studying ways to dodge the sniffles. But metastudy from the University of Oxford ...

5 months ago

Truth just about as strange as Orwellian fiction

When an 18-year-old Jessica Johnson won the Orwell Youth Prize last year for her story about a "Band system" for students, meant to promote on merit but in reality offering opportunities only to the rich and down-marking the poor, she didn't know that she would be the victim of such a system just...

Jason Norwood-Young

5 months ago

As old as the hills

I was raised to believe Neolithic man regularly hefted boulders the size of buses halfway across the UK, because the five tonne "blue stones" of Stonehenge were mined from a quarry some 250km away. So I'm a little disappointed to find out that this week, scientists have pinpointed where the large...

5 months ago

Still beating the Drum

South Africa's Drum magazine has changed a lot since it was launched 70 years ago, and now it's undergoing its next transformation from celeb gossip mag to online-only publication. Journalism.co.za has a celebration of the early history of the magazine, when it was a ground-breaking, deep thinkin...

5 months ago

The return of the interrobang, and other pearls of wisdom from the Temporary AP Stylebook‽

The Twitter hack that threw the internets into disarray this week provided the opportunity for the Temporary AP Stylebook (@TempAPStyle) to emerge, and blast out a new era of style while the real AP Stylebook's verified account status was disabled. And there were some pearlers,,, https://twitter....

Jason Norwood-Young

6 months ago