Four short links: 3 July 2009

Stats, Public Domain, Sewers, and Garbage

1. OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter)
2. James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain.
3. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When I joined Apple back in 2003, the central build farm for all projects had both PowerPC and x86 Darwin boxes, and our code had to compile on both. Steve was playing a long game, years before the Intel switch he was obviously planning for it, (though I only caught the significance in retrospect).
4. Open Data Makes Garbage Collection Sexier, Easier, and Cheaper -- pragmatic use for open government data. For more on the author of this post, see Hello World for Open Data by Tim Bray.