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Thanks for the compliment! The larger graph is basically built by extracting all relationships of certain types (e.g. parent/child, teacher/student, cause/effect) from Wikidata, along with the earliest known date for the items (e.g. date of birth, time of invention/discovery). The layout started as a 3D force-directed layout, but I turned one axis into the timeline. For the visualization, I used (forked) https://github.com/anvaka/pm (which did get some deserved attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40817852 ) and the related ngraph.offline.layout repo.

Trying to answer your final question: there are a lot of things that I should probably improve here, but I've also wondered if this kind of giant graph visualization just doesn't really work for most people.

For something related that takes a very different approach: https://causegraph.github.io/causalaxies

In contrast to the author's decisions here, I decided to

-go for an "everything tree" even if that will contain many more errors

-use DBpedia/Wikidata, and address issues discovered by editing Wikipedia/Wikidata

-use a 3D visualization tool, due to the size of the graph

I think it reveals an interesting overall structure, and some interesting details for those who zoom in despite the issues with the data.

Speaking of Burke, I believe his book The Pinball Effect has notations in the margins directing the reader to other pages that mention the same node in the graph (whether that's exactly how he thought of it or not). It seems like an interesting attempt to express this non-linear structure in the form of a book.

The novella "To Be Taught, If Fortunate," the only Becky Chambers book not part of either of those series, is also good.

3c here as well. The doctors were surprised that it had spread to my bones, and it didn’t show up on the CT scans that they were using for surveillance.

There actually is a small "2019" at the bottom of it.

People have spent some time entering programming languages, their publication/release dates, and their relationships (e.g. "influenced by", "based on") in Wikipedia and Wikidata. I like the latter, because it makes it easier to keep track of specific claims and their references. If people did more work on that, those relationships could be used to generate larger diagrams/histories like this and keep them up to date.

There's a strong implication that Sesame Credit and the Social Credit System idea follow the example of FICO scores. Has anybody in the Chinese government explicitly stated this?

I'm working on CauseGraph, a set of tools for analyzing cause/influence relationships between people and events over time. http://causegraph.org

Everytown is funded by wealthy people like Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett. If there aren't enough other donors to give them the resources that the NRA has, it might be that there aren't enough people who support their agenda enough to donate. They are not "the little guy".

This article seems to be missing something important: the postal service is still subsidized by the federal government, even if there isn't a direct transfer of taxpayer money.

The mail I receive through USPS is ~90% unwanted (maybe more, if you go by weight), despite my ongoing efforts to "go paperless" and opt out of marketing mail. If I could stop this constant flow of junk, I would gladly pay UPS/FedEx twice as much money to deliver the small amount of mail that I actually care about.

Impairment should be the focus, rather than the amount of any substance in anybody's bloodstream. Why not a general test of perception and reaction time?

It's an informative answer in terms of what current policy is, but "it may be" is not a good justification for legal restriction on what people can do with government inventions.

"The NFA proved very effective at reducing (eliminating, actually) murders committed with automatic weapons on the registry"

That might be a bit too optimistic about the NFA. The NFA likely did reduce the possession and use of machine guns, but one reason for that is that people could just buy semi-automatics instead without dealing with the NFA-related headache, which suited most people just fine. Also, a lot of the crimes committed with NFA-regulated weapons prior to passage of the NFA were related to Prohibition, weren't they?

Your experience with fiberglass reminds me of http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnionInTheVarnish

The NSA has apparently been pulping its paper waste for a while: https://www.nsa.gov/about/commitment/nsa_goes_green/nsa_recy...

A little bit later, there's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World

I think they're two different projects, but this is exactly what I thought of. A separate Chinese DDoS was even mentioned by cjb in his announcement of GitTorrent a few months ago: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...

> “Before, they were into turf...now they’re more interested in making money.”

So they switched from a zero-sum game to a positive-sum game?

I found the color palette used in the visualization to be unnecessarily confusing. Dark to light blue, then light to dark earth tones, with the key roughly even with the bottom of the column.

If Apple were just trying to get people to buy upgraded stuff from them, I'd understand. But they're not even doing that very well; the $699 configuration minis still come standard with a 5400 rpm spinning disk, for example, and SSDs and 16GB RAM are both considered "customized Macs" that you can't just walk into any Apple Store and buy.

The "most users" thing might be technically true, but I bet a lot of the minis belonging to those users were still being upgraded after being sold by the original owners.

I think "capture" is the key word. They're not trying to create wealth for their users with this action; they're trying to capture it for their company and its shareholders.

I think that's what lots of people are wondering. There doesn't seem to be a good reason here, from the customer's point of view. It looks like they're just trying to push people to buy new machines instead of upgrading the old ones, which is disappointing. I was waiting for the update, and I even bought one, but I returned it a few days later; too much about it just wasn't acceptable.

Of course, before it was taken by the government, that "public wealth" was private wealth, and the taking of that private wealth was also justified with fear.

Perhaps constantly seeing and feeling the read and unread pages of the book reinforces the sense of when things happened in the story.

Not sure if it means anything, but your comment reminded me of this blog post written after Steve Jobs died: http://daringfireball.net/2011/10/universe_dented_grass_unde...

Is this a problem in the US specifically? Has there been some kind of international comparison on legal "messiness"? Just curious, by the way, and I can't think up a good search query for that.

This was mentioned in the article, along with Gene Healy's "Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything".