Because young single professionals are so… sparse in the north, I’ve taken a glance or two at online dating profiles. You know, the ones in which men of all ages post a few grizzly selfies and attempt to promote their virtues to the young ladies of 2015: As with my earlier posts on…
Google loves data. I’ve reviewed Google nGrams before; built on top of their massive project to scan published books, it’s a way to study how our written culture changes over time. Below, I’ll cover a few more interesting tools, which I hope will be fun for you to play around with: 1. Find what…
Have you ever wanted to grab information from a website but found it time-consuming to copy-paste everything? Well, here’s your way around that! A few weeks ago I ran across an extension of Chrome that lets you gather and transform information from webpages. Normally, this sort of thing requires some technical…
I’ve just finished reading Uncharted (2013), in which Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel describe how they convinced Google to create the Ngram Viewer. This is a great tool that lets you analyze word frequency across millions of books, and a powerful set of data that you can play with for free–so try…
I often snap a bunch of similar shots when out taking pictures, and although usually I delete the duplicates, sometimes I catch a nice effect when flipping through the pictures quickly: I’m sure you’ve seen it, but ‘wiggle GIFs’ create a sort of vibrating stereoscopic effect by combining two…
Besides easily annotating PDFs on the go, my favorite use for the iPad is the painting apps. It’s one of the few things I’ll buy through the iStore, figuring that a good app costs less than physical art supplies, and I’m more likely to sketch on a tablet than…
On the last day of school, Zhanigul-apai* stops me in the hall: “Can you give an interview in Kazakh tomorrow?” I nod. Usually this means cameras show up to my workplace and I talk for a few minutes: how long I’ve been here, how much I like it, isn’t…
As a quick note, I was looking for trilingual (English, Russian, Kazakh) fonts today. There are many great font websites where you can download lovely typefaces for English, and sometimes Russian, but it’s much harder to locate the specialized characters needed to display Kazakh. (There’s an official website with…
Many travelers who visit Astana are struck by the feeling of a Dubai on the Steppe, where flashy buildings express the aspiration of a nation. That is probably oversimplified — I’ll reflect more on Astana soon — but I it’s true that Kazakhstan’s capital has undergone rapid changes. Once…
Last year, I covered WeAreThe99Percent, a blog where people held up signs to express dissatisfaction with life in America during the recession. So it’s been interesting to see the patamushta (патамушта) meme arise in similar ways. When I first saw Hyperbole and a Half redone in Russian, I didn’t get the punchline: Huh? I thought. Must be…