Links for Wednesday, November 4, 2010

• Smashing Magazine: Data Visualization: Modern Approaches – “Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.“
• William Deresiewicz: What Are You Going to do With That? – “If you’re going to invent your own life, if you’re going to be truly autonomous, you also need courage: moral courage. The courage to act on your values in the face of what everyone’s going to say and do to try to make you change your mind. Because they’re not going to like it. Morally courageous individuals tend to make the people around them very uncomfortable. They don’t fit in with everybody else’s ideas about the way the world is supposed to work, and still worse, they make them feel insecure about the choices that they themselves have made—or failed to make. People don’t mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.“
• UK Telegraph: Lost Language Discoverd on Back of Letter – “Archaelogists have claimed that scrawl on the back of a letter recovered from a 17th century dig site reveals a previously unknown language spoken by indigenous peoples in northern Peru.“
• Jake Seliger: How Universities Work – “The reality is that your specific major probably doesn’t matter nearly as much as your tenacity, ability to learn, and the consistent application of that ability to learn to specific problems. One way people—friends, employers, graduate schools, colleagues, etc.—measure this is by measuring the way you speak and write, which together are a proxy for how much and how deeply you’ve read.“
• Nalates’ Things & Stuff Blog: Qarl Fizz Prim Alignment Tool – “Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden, has written viewer code to add an alignment feature to viewers. The code has been released for TPV Developers to use. He of course has a working viewer with the code in it. I’m so jealous…“
• Open Heat Map – “*Turn your spreadsheet into a map. 1 – Upload your spreadsheet, 2 – Get an interactive online map in seconds *“
• Ymacs: AJAX Source Code Editor – “*Like most cool projects, Ymacs started out of necessity. What’s ironic is that after hacking on it for a few days, I almost forgot the purpose I had in mind and kept adding features to make it more Emacs-like, faster and more stable and currently, it still doesn’t have the features that I wanted in the first place. (however, it got close: it should be easy now to add a decent Lisp-mode). *“