Assorted links #32
Sep 1, 2023
- Notes on Mauritania: As all posts from Matt Lakeman, definitely worth checking out.
- Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability
- A Blog Post With Every HTML Element: Independent of how much you know about HTML, you will learn (at least) a thing or two from going through this blog post.
- When sports rules go awry: A lot of interesting examples on unexpected consequences of rules in various sports.
- Hashing: The basics of hash function. Interesting throughout.
- The Sad Bastard Cookbook: A cookbook for people who are bad at, or new to, cooking (or at least looking for easy ways to upgrade easy meals).
- The 2023 World Scrabble Championship Finals were EPIC: Clickbaity title but a really good recap.
- Use RSS: I say it again and again, but it is, alas, worth repeating.
- The Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database: A database with "missing" data, not missing data.
- One Hundred Ideas for Computing, Another 85+ Ideas for Computing, An Extra 100 Ideas for Computing, Additional 100+ Ideas for Computing: Too many ideas, but useful as inspiration.
- How England’s football league is breaking the sport: As a non-follower of the Premier League, I learned a lot from this.
- 100 things I know
- Rhyme Theory
- Vanity Cards by Chuck Lorre: From what I can tell you can only access Chuck Lorre's vanity cards via archive.org now. They are great. Among the first ones, you find takes such as "I believe that what doesn't kill us makes us bitter.", "I believe that the very act of believing in something causes us to distance ourselves from that thing, thus a duality is created: oneself and the thing in which one believes.", and "I happen to believe that a life unexamined is a life not worth living. I also happen to believe that a life examined will cause an incredible amount of heartache."
- The Studies Show Podcast
- List of photographs considered the most important
- Ten thousand ways to use chopsticks
- Protecting yourself from phone theft
- Living without a smartphone: The definitive guide
- One Day You'll Find Yourself
- My ranking of every Shakespeare play
- Some random facts with numbers: Around 14,000 dinosaur species live on as birds today (smithsonianmag.com). The correlation between company ESG scores and carbon intensity is .04 (ft.com). As a quick estimate, 111,111 meters in the y direction is 1 degree (of latitude) (gis.stackexchange.com). 60 tonnes of paint is used to when painting the Eiffel Tower (toureiffel.paris). Beer expenditure consumed 12.5% of people’s salary in 1734 in England (lefineder.com).
- Metascience Since 2012: A Personal History
- Resources for World-Builders
- What Makes Music Sound Good?
- Studying the Limits of Human Perfection, Through Darts
- The history of Tetris randomizers
- A Quickstart Guide to Privacy
- Exploring the design space of binary search trees
- Every Construction Machine Explained in 15 Minutes
- Splitting the Web
- Care to share? Experimental evidence on code sharing behavior in the social sciences: Interesting study. I was one of the subjects, i.e., I got a mail from the authors asking to share the replication material for one of my papers.
- The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
- Why did people in the past look so much older?
- London Then And Now: Aerial Shots Show City Grow Over Past Two Decades
- How many cities can you name?
- AI Snake Oil: One of my favourite blogs at the moment. High quality posts on AI, machine learning, ChatGTP, etc. See, for example, this recent post on the weird study in Public Choice on political biases in LLMs. Or this post on using machine learning to predict scientific replicability.
- Rijkscollection
- How to travel in India
- How cruise ships got so big: Great summary of the history of cruise ships from Vox.
- In This Essay I Will: On Distraction: In order not to distract you too much, I saved the best for last. A strong essay.
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