Nerd Alert Issue 22: Calling all cool kids

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What we're reading this week

Adam: As someone who used to work a lot with audio, I’m really excited to see the resurgence in podcasting that’s been happening recently, but I’m especially excited about the possibilities of using audio in interactive pieces that live in the browser. For a great overview of the current state of in-browser audio, Tyler Fisher (from NPR’s visuals team) has a great rundown of what they’ve learned.

Ben: `git blame` tells you who last changed a line of code, but what if you want to see how that line has evolved over time? Try git’s line log search. You can see the history of a function with `git log -L :function_name:path/to/file.txt`

Dani: The New York Times visualizes the Best and Worst Places to Grow Up, a map of US counties, income mobility, and poverty. This tool is a great example of how visualization and data analysis can be used to track and tackle social issues.

Kaeti: This week I took a moment to reread our team manifesto. It was a good reminder of why we’re doing this work and what we’re striving to be.

Meredith: One of the most successful children's book authors, John Green, shares a a few ideas about measuring love and distractions.

Nick: Are you one of those nerds who loves finding a “shortcut” to solving a problem that ends up taking an order of magnitude longer, but is somehow deeply satisfying nonetheless? Check out this write up on using Mathematica for finding the optimal search strategy in Where’s Waldo? books.

Ryan: IPython notebooks now render inline on Github. Take advantage of this great education and documentation tool!

Will: This week I discovered the scrapers behind Sunlight Foundation’s Open States Project. If you’re anything like me and you like to see how curated data is collected — or you want to build your own scrapers for government data — check it out.