Amit Patel

are there enough seals around to watch this time of year? - kartik vaithyanathan

Awesome! I have only been there once and want to go back. - Amit Patel

"Dwarven Forge's Game Tiles Kickstarter project seeks to bring revolutionary miniature terrain to everyone in the tabletop gaming world." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"$1,264,406 pledged of $50,000 goal" - Amit Patel

It cries foam? - Amit Patel

What did you do to it, Amit?!? - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

One look at me and animals cry ;( - Amit Patel

"To hundreds of thousands of devotees, he is Mister Money Mustache. And he is here to tell you that early retirement doesn’t only happen to Powerball winners and those who luck into a big inheritance. He and his wife retired from middle-income jobs before they had their son. Exasperated, as he puts it, by “a barrage of skeptical questions from high-income peers who were still in debt years after we were free from work,” he created a no-nonsense personal finance blog and started spilling his secrets. I was eager to know more. He is Pete (just Pete, for the sake of his family’s privacy). He lives in Longmont, Colo. He is ridiculously happy. And he’s sure his life could be yours" - Amit Patel

It itself is an ascii art C program, generating ascii art. But the ascii art it generates can itself be run. And THAT produces even more ascii art. And that too can be run, producing even more. Keep going and you eventually get a program that generates one of the previous arts, forming a loop. - Amit Patel

And the artwork is signed by the guy, but you don't see the signature until you've run it through the C compiler. - Amit Patel

They were so cute!! I know it's not zooborns.com but still, I got to see them from not too far away :) - Amit Patel

"The best answer to SimCity, and its only challenger as the most interesting simulation game, is just across the way from it at the MOMA exhibition: Dwarf Fortress. It is not so much SimCity’s monstrous offspring as its gifted, maniacal, extremely worrisome younger brother." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

" In one of the online accounts of FlareChannel’s history, the fort’s creator relates his “favorite story,” which he calls “The Fable of Catten and Eagle.” He tells of a single semi-tame giant eagle—one of many that fill the fort—who took an intense, inexplicable liking to Catten, a particularly competent dwarf, but also one entirely indifferent to the eagle. Twelve game-years later,... more... - Amit Patel

"Alpha is the world's first strapless, continuous heart rate watch that is ECG accurate, on the WRIST at run speeds up to 20 kph!" - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"Before there was LogLog, SuperLogLog or HyperLogLog there was Probabilistic Counting with Stochastic Averaging (PCSA) from the seminal work “Probabilistic Counting Algorithms for Data Base Applications” (also known as the “FM Sketches” due to its two authors, Flajolet and Martin). The basis of PCSA matches that of the other Flajolet distinct value (DV) counters: hash values from a collection into binary strings, use patterns in those strings as indicators for the number of distinct values in that collection (bit-pattern observables), then use stochastic averaging to combine m trials into a better estimate. Our HyperLogLog post has more details on these estimators as well as stochastic averaging." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

(with interactive demos that let you try out the algorithm) - Amit Patel

"Here are some facts about the freshwater eel that might surprise you. It can swim backwards equally well as forwards; while highly sought after in Asia, it's virtually ignored here in the U.S.; some can live over 100 years. Eels are the only fish that spawn in The Middle of the ocean, but spend their adult lives in freshwater, the opposite of most migratory fishes, like salmon and shad; and they are a multibillion dollar business." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

and very expensive sashimi! - imabonehead

"Archive Team is a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage. Since 2009 this variant force of nature has caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions - and done our best to save the history before it's lost forever. Along the way, we've gotten attention, resistance, press and discussion, but most importantly, we've gotten the message out: IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"This website is intended to be an offloading point and information depot for a number of archiving projects, all related to saving websites or data that is in danger of being lost. Besides serving as a hub for team-based pulling down and mirroring of data, this site will provide advice on managing your own data and rescuing it from the brink of destruction." - Amit Patel

"Finally, a command line shell for the 90s The new fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for OS X, Linux, and the rest of the family." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

I would very much like to see him eaten by my lion cub :)) - پروتژه

"After a crime like yesterday's Boston bombings, it can be worthwhile to reflect on how we've reacted to similar tragedies.  Consider the case of Richard Jewell." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

:-( - Amit Patel

"Earlier this year, the BART Board made changes to how fees are set for paid parking. The new paid parking fees will be based on parking use at each station. Every 6 months, parking lot use will be measured. If the lot at a station is full, then the daily parking fee will increase by 50¢. If the lot is less than 95% full, then the fee will decrease by 50¢." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

My main goal of using bart that day was to reduce stress, but I ended up missing the Colma bart station (not sure how), and just drove the rest of the way up 280. I spent $9 on parking, plus $3 (?) in gas. This was more than the $2.50 parking plus $6.60 bart ticket would've been. But I also saved 30 minutes, which I then spent hanging out with friends instead of sitting on a train full of supermodels. - Amit Patel

"I first came across Google’s interest in Star Trek back in the summer of 2010. A company spokesman wanted to show me the firm’s rapidly improving visual search and speech-recognition technology. At the time, those features were available only on Android phones, and, back then, Android was getting shellacked by the iPhone. So when the spokesman told me that he regarded the latest Android devices as something like a combination of Star Trek’s tricorder and the USS Enterprise’s computer, I dismissed it as a gimmick to attract media attention for a struggling brand. Not that he was totally wrong—in 2010, asking your phone to search for something, rather than typing in your query, was pretty cool. It just wasn’t Star Trek-cool. Since then, though, Star Trek has popped up again and again in my interviews with Googlers." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

(Internally, Google's been getting some inspiration from Star Trek for a very long time - see http://searchenginewatch.com/article... for example) - Amit Patel

"Adinkra are visual symbols, originally created by the Ashanti of Ghana and the Gyaman of Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa, that represent concepts or aphorisms. Adinkra are used extensively in fabrics, pottery, logos and advertising. They are incorporated into walls and other architectural features. Fabric adinkra are often made by woodcut sign writing as well as screen printing. Adinkra symbols appear on some traditional akan gold weights. The symbols are also carved on stools for domestic and ritual use. Tourism has led to new departures in the use of the symbols in such items as T shirts and jewelry." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

Also see the list at http://www.adinkra.org/htmls... - Amit Patel

Denkyem the crocodile looks like a turtle to me. - Amit Patel

"A project that I've been working on off and on for more than a year now, the Humble Hacker Keyboard (i.e. a keyboard for humble hackers like me) is an idea for a keyboard that I believe would appeal mostly to programmers, though it could have more widespread appeal.  This is a big project for me, and I was hoping to have a complete working version before I made it public, but time being as scarce as it is, that could be a while.  In the meantime, since I found geekhack, I thought this would be the perfect place to introduce it to the world." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"OPEN SEVEN DAYS" - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"Closed SUNDAY" - Amit Patel

also it's "spotless clean for you sitting confort" - what more could you ask? - m9m, Crone of FriendFeed

Log scale chart of bitcoin value - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"Virtual bitcoin mining is a real-world environmental disaster" <-- we humans can turn anything into an environmental disaster. - John (bird whisperer)

I can't tell who has the upper hand, er, wing. - Micah from FFHound(roid)!

My guess is that the wasp was hijacking the spider in order to lay its egg(s) in the spider. - John (bird whisperer)

#thugLife - Micah from FFHound(roid)!

"Seven-spotted lady beetle" - Amit Patel

Looks like the bug on the left is a ladybug larva! I had no idea. - Amit Patel

Specifically, a seven-spotted lady beetle (coccinella septempunctata) larva; see photos at http://bugguide.net/node... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... . This took a while to figure out but bugguide.net is pretty handy. - Amit Patel

Pics from a wedding in Realm of the Mad God. For a game that's all about combat, it's really weird to see this sort of socializing. - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

I love how instead of tossing rice or birdseed, they just start shooting. - Rob Shillingsburg

"Long before the Panama and Suez Canals made commercial trading between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans economically feasible, ships made the long and perilous trip around the African and South America continents. Explorers, traders, and world leaders looking for faster and less dangerous shipping routes to far-away areas of the world have long eyed two routes through the ice-choked Arctic Ocean--the fabled Northwest Passage, through the cold Arctic waters north of Canada, and the Northeast Passage, extending along the northern coast of Russia. The first recorded attempt to find and sail the Northwest Passage was in 1497, and ended in failure. The thick ice choking the waterways thwarted all attempts at passage for the next four centuries." - Amit Patel from Bookmarklet

"But the unprecedented melting during the summer of 2007 saw the Northwest Passage become ice-free and navigable along its entire length without the need for an icebreaker as of August 14, 2007. The sailboat Cloud Nine took advantage of the conditions, and sailed the entire length of the Passage. Remarkably, the Northwest Passage remained ice-free for 36 days, finally re-freezing over a small section on September 19. " - Amit Patel