Assorted links #32
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Notes on Mauritania: As all posts from Matt Lakeman, definitely worth checking out.
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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.
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When sports rules go awry: A lot of interesting examples on unexpected consequences of rules in various sports.
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Hashing: The basics of hash function. Interesting throughout.
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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).
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The 2023 World Scrabble Championship Finals were EPIC: Clickbaity title but a really good recap.
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Use RSS: I say it again and again, but it is, alas, worth repeating.
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The Recently Extinct Plants and Animals Database: A database with "missing" data, not missing data.
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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.
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How England’s football league is breaking the sport: As a non-follower of the Premier League, I learned a lot from this.
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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."
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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).
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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.
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London Then And Now: Aerial Shots Show City Grow Over Past Two Decades
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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.
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How cruise ships got so big: Great summary of the history of cruise ships from Vox.
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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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