Architecture of Density [Photoblog]

With a population of over 7 million people packed into an area of 426 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. As with other places where development cannot expand horizontally, apartment buildings tend to get taller and taller in order to provide living space for all the inhabitants.
German photographer Michael Wolf decided to capture this population density through a series of photographs studying the architecture of these high rises. The project is titled “Architecture of Density.”

Marimba ringtone, improvised [Video]

Today’s links are a selection of videos I came across the last week. (the real reason for a lack of reading material: I have been reading Nate Silver’s The Signal & The Noise, and have barely read anything else!)

You’ve heard the iPhone marimba ring many times.. but have you heard it like this? Awesome improvisation by France’s KIZ Musique duo (I should rip this to be my ring tone, me thinks!).

What business is Wall Street in these days? [Article]

Exasperated with high frequency algorithm trading that now makes up a bulk of financial market transactions, entrepreneur Mark Cuban wonders what business Wall Street is in.

Wall Street is no longer serving the purpose  what it was designed to .  Wall Street was designed to be a market to which companies provide securities (stocks/bonds), from which they received capital that would help them start/grow/sell businesses. Investors made their money by recognizing value where others did not, or by simply committing to a company and growing with it as a shareholder, receiving dividends or appreciation in their holdings.  What percentage of the market is driven by investors these days ?

News is bad for you – Rolf Dobelli [Article]

Rolf Dobelli, in a blog post quoted by the Guardian, says that news is bad for you — and giving up reading it will make you. (I personally gave up reading “newspapers” a few years ago – instead news, if important to me, finds me.) You can download Rolf’s essay here.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. 

The map is not the territory [Article, video]

Elizabeth Bear shares a link to a very rare recording of a nuclear bomb going off – watch & listen to it here – to remind us that the map is not the territory 

..the media we consume produces our map of the world. We process our understanding of reality through those filters: the human brain deals with a world of unrelenting complexity by finding patterns and filtering out input deemed to be irrelevant.