Despite Kazakhstan’s modern capital, many of the country’s citizens hold on to vestiges of their nomadic ancestry. A conceptual look at this common practice.
Category Archives: Photography
October 25, 2017
April 26, 2017
During World War II, a Douglas Dakota of BOAC is silhouetted at Gibraltar by the batteries of searchlights on the Rock, as crews prepare it for a night flight to the United Kingdom (Wikimedia Commons).
April 7, 2017
Hunting for treasure at low tide
Joseph Fox photographed the mudlarkers who comb the shore of London’s River Thames. Originally a term for the city’s poor who scraped a meagre living by scavenging in the river’s mud, it has been adopted by a new breed of treasure hunters, often armed with metal detectors.
These men and women show off their favourite finds, and discuss the joys of mudlarking.
February 19, 2016
Neglected Utopia: Photographer explores the forgotten modernist estates of Paris
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Paris was booming. Foreign migration and urbanisation of the city caused a huge surge in population and a crisis for housing. France’s solution came in the form of vast housing projects and so during this period massive, modernist and really quite unique estates sprung up across the city — aiming for a new way of living.
Just a few decades later and these towering buildings look dated, discarded and forgotten. Often stigmatised by the media, they divide opinion in France and have been left mostly occupied by the ageing community of ‘urban veterans’ who first made it their home, as the younger generation are drawn to more contemporary city living.
Say what you will about the buildings, but the photography itself is breathtaking.
October 16, 2015
R vs Python: head to head data analysis
There have been dozens of articles written comparing Python and R from a subjective standpoint. We’ll add our own views at some point, but this article aims to look at the languages more objectively. We’ll analyze a dataset side by side in Python and R, and show what code is needed in both languages to achieve the same result.
A good, quick overview.
May 13, 2015
Bloom Filter for JavaScript
I wrote a very fast bloom filter implementation in JavaScript called bloomfilter.js. It uses the non-cryptographic Fowler–Noll–Vo hash function for speed. We can get away with using a non-cryptographic hash function as we only care about having a uniform distribution of hashes.
The implementation also uses JavaScript typed arrays if possible, as these are faster when performing low-level bitwise operations.