12/21/2012. Some say the end is near. But there’s still time to watch the best music videos about Doomsday. Tool – Ænema “Some say the end is near. Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon – I certainly hope we will” sings Maynard James Keenan. Here, the end of the world means “fret for your figure […]
Yearly Archives: 2012
Unlock files that ArcMap forgot to unlock
ArcMap has the bad habit of forgetting to unlock files that you remove from a project. I have lost hours, as the only solution to remove unwanted locks seemed to be shutting down ArcMap, modifying the file, then restarting ArcMap (that takes at least a minute to load each time). Nothing seemed to help until […]
Switzerland discusses food sovereignty – a vegetarian diet might be the answer
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet”, said Albert Einstein. This might also the answer to the questions discussed this Wednesday, September 19th in the Swiss parliament (both in the Conseil National and in the Conseil des États). “Food […]
Sunrise or Sunset? Per Capita GDP Evolution in EU Member States
The infographic above looks like a sunset or a sunrise rendered in an impressionist painting of the pixel age. It illustrates EU’s per capita domestic product from 1998 to 2011, expressed in “purchasing power standard” (PPS). To get the PPS, you divide the per capita GDP by the purchasing power parity index. It says, more […]
Restore “New > Text file” in Windows’ contextual menu
If you’ve changed your standard .tex file editor to Notepad2 or Notepad++, chances are that the contextual menu entry “Create New > Document file” has disappeared. To restore it, just save the following code as a .reg file and run it (thanks to Archos alias Limneos for posting the code on a SevenForums): Windows Registry […]
I want Windows 7 to sort my files alphabetically, and I mean from 0 to z!
I want Windows 7 to sort my files alphabetically, and I mean alphanumerically, from 0 to z, in ASCII order. Windows 7 acts way too smart sorting files by names to my taste. On more ancient versions of Windows (e.g. Windows 2000) the sorting order would be something like this: Ie4_01 Ie4_128 Ie401sp2 Ie5 Ie501sp2 […]
The shadow of Curiosity
This morning August 6th, after fourteen years of planning and months of anxious waiting, the Curiosity mars rover has landed, sending as a proof of its success a fisheye picture of pebbles, dust, and its own shadow on the surface of Mars. It is the largest and most advanced machine to ever land on another […]
The Islands of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
[Une version révisée, en français, de cet article, publiée dans Le Temps, Genève, en 2012, peut être téléchargée ici.] Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have been 300 years old today. He was already 53 in October 1765 when he left the waves of the Lake Bienne, heart-sick, expelled from the Island of St. Peter upon the order […]
Colored proportional circles in ArcMap
Bivariate thematic mapping with ArcMap? Yes you can! Of course, you could also do it in D3.js (including a nice self-generated legend), or with much less effort in Quantum GIS (post in French). Whatever method you choose, colored proportional circles cannot be drawn directly on polygons, but you can draw them on points. Thus, all […]
A mobility network
Methods and tools After a day and a half of work and fine-tuning, here we go: the commuting network of all individuals either residing, working or studying in the canton Valais. I’ve used R, with the RStudio GUI, and the igraph library for R. My staring point was the mobility matrix between all communes, including […]