This Week In Costambar

I can say,that the weekend just gone, has been a very good one in terms of people flocking to Costambar
it has been the busiest i have seen for a few years (beating Samana Santa) this weekend was another bank holiday here and it also fell on a pay day, so the beach was packed Sunday, the sun was out very early so
all the plans that had been made to travel from Santiago and La Vega were a go, places to go and money to spend? you can tell here when it's going to be a good day when you see 100 plus people traipsing down the road to the beach carrying chairs, tables and the pans of cooked food prepared early morning or the night before, followed later by bus loads of people and a very large number of cars, all with one thing in mind? having a good time with friends and family. El Carey was as packed as I've seen in a long time and with the music all the dancer's took to the floor large, tall, thin and (not so thin) everybody was out to have a good time.

As Sunday was the bank holiday, as in any country you take Monday as your day off, so again the beach was the place to be,even with the early downpour(and with more rain predicted)  they came by foot by car and by bus, not in the same numbers as Sunday( a bit of rain who cares), but enough people did come, to make it a fun time on the beach and put a smile on the faces of the the beach vender's, who have, over the last year? had a pretty hard time keeping things going.

I do hope with a little bit of good fortune we could see a change in the number of people coming to Costambar we could use them.?

Map of the World Drawn Entirely Using Facebook Connections

The above map of the world, drawn by Facebook data structuring intern Paul Butler using connections between 10 million Facebook friends (full-size link), is interesting enough in itself until you realize that all of the country borders are entirely drawn using Facebook friend connections too. Even if the world was dark and totally unmapped, Facebook could produce a remarkably good approximation of most of its continents’ boundaries, and even the borders of some countries.

It still took some clever math. Butler explains how he did it:

I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

…

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.

What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Note the lack of definition in China and Russia, and the relative hole in Brazil. As we explained in a recent post, these countries are among the world’s last holdouts in having dominant social networking sites other than Facebook. (QZone, VKontakte, and Orkut, respectively.)

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