Writing Systems; Miss Korea and facial analysis

In a blog post, the relationship between the complexity of writing systems and its associated culture is discussed. While I do not agree with some arguments, it opens an interesting perspective.

On another note, there is an interesting (mathematical) analysis of the top 20 Miss Korea contestants and the similarity of their faces.

Auctioneers and High Performance

There is an interesting article/blog post on the architecture of the LMAX exchange. They prefer a single thread model with event sourcing over an actor driven model. Betfair, a company related to the LMAX owners, at least for a while, used an actor, in memory model for sports betting. These issues are only relevant when handling very high volumes of trades, but certainly might become increasingly interesting for exchanges handling crypto currencies like bitcoin, litecoin or ppcoin.

Quick permutations

itertools for python are fun:

import itertools

partb= list(itertools.imap(lambda x: "".join(x), itertools.combinations('aApe',3)))
parta = list(itertools.imap(lambda x: "".join(x), itertools.permutations('gRrAet!1',5)))

print '\n'.join(list(itertools.imap(lambda x: "".join(x), (itertools.product(parta, partb)))))

But in the end, this post is just to test out the syntax highlighting feature in javascript.