Misc Links
Megabatch for November 2024
I’m offloading a lot of saved links from my phone here.
Hyperinflation and trust in Ancient Rome
The Fed has “Blackout Periods” during which certain people at the fed aren’t allowed to talk about their work. Ran into this when a speaker at a conference realized he put the dates in his calendar wrong. He was able to ask other people questions but had to cancel his own talk.
A History of Microwave Ovens - taylor.town - I think I saved the link in part because the styling on the page is cute.
Commonly used arm positions can substantially overestimate blood pressure readings - hn - I’ve used a blood pressure analogy a few times to explain how GDP and similar measurements are useful even despite the the weirdness. What makes certain measurements useful isn’t just accuracy. It’s also the fact that they are reasonably 1. consistent, 2. predictive of things we care about, and 3. practical to collect.
One thing I keep telling myself I should do is incorporate more interactive gamelike activities into my lectures. Here’s a website - econoclass - with some examples which might serve as inspiration.
“Custom exempt” meat is is where a firm slaughters and processes an animal for you and gives you the meat. It’s stamped with a “NOT FOR SALE” emblem. The idea is that way you don’t need all the paperwork and inspections to turn your own pig into sausage or whatever, and the catch is just that the meat can’t be sold or donated. (Doesn’t stop people from trying to sell it on Facebook anyways.)
Fact or fiction: Do redheads feel more pain? - The same gene that makes a person ginger also interacts with pain perception. Certain kinds of anesthesia are less effective for redheads.
The Yankees very briefly had a mascot named Dandy. It went terribly. The owner hated him. Fans attacked him. The Yankees offered to renew the contract for the license, but they wouldn’t agree to pay for the bodyguard to protect him.
“I fell off the stage, and they just lunged at me,” Ford said. “I heard somebody scream, ‘Unzip his head! Unzip his head!’ I was pretty scared.”
Mechanical Watch - Bartosz Ciechanowski - A beautiful interactive explanation. There are a lot of other good explainers on this website as well.
“Galapagos Syndrome” is used to describe how Japanese smartphone design followed a different evolutionary trajectory.
Demographics of Manhattan - Wikipedia According to the chart on this page, the population of Manhattan peaked around 1910, presumably related to the wave of immigration? The other boroughs of NYC have increased in population since then. (The WP sources just link to a non-time-series census page, so I’ll want to come back and doublecheck this little fun-fact sooner or later.)
Simon Magus - Wikipedia - Simon Magus is a guy mentioned in Acts who is described as a sorceror and tries to pay the apostle Peter to teach him how to do miracles. Later non-biblical works give him all sorts of crazy powers, like the ability to fly, and exagerate his meeting with Peter into straight-up anime nonsense.
The Most And Least Attractive Male Hobbies - Results are about what you’d expect but more importantly: According to this survey, 12% of women find it attractive when men collect Funko Pops and argue with people online. Either online surveys are incredibly unreliable, or there’s somebody out there for everybody.
Go First Dice. There are sets of dice that, when rolled together, will each display a unique number and where each dice has an equal chance of being the highest. (Useful for deciding who goes first in a board game.) Elegant solutions exist for up to four players. 5 players requires 60 sided dice. 6 requires a total mess.ma
matrixmultiplication.xyz - Cute little matrix multiplication visualizer. Good for if I ever need to explain matrix multiplcation to students. Github repo
Disappearing polymorph - Wikipedia. Some chemicals can form multiple different kinds of crystals. Sometimes the presence of even microscopic amounts of one variant acts as a seed which makes the chemical always take on that crystal form. Two years after going on the market, HIV drug Ritonavir suddenly stopped working because it all started crystalizing into a form that the body can’t absorb.
Necromolds is a miniature wargame when you make the soldiers out of playdough and smash them when they die. Sounds like a mess, but gosh, what a cute idea.
The city of Xico, near Mexico city, sits next to a volcanic crater with farmland inside. It makes for some striking images. Also: One proposed etymology for “Mexico” is navel of the moon, and this the Hill of Xico reminds me of a bellybutton. Coincidence? 🤷♀️
Is my blue your blue? (My boundary is at is at hue 171, “greener than 72% of the population”)
June 2024
During WWII, the US government published advertisements for products people couldn’t buy. those products were being used in the war effort, but the companies wanted to maintain brand recognition among future consumers, among other reasons.
First Steps, by Georgios Jakobides. I just think it’s a cute painting. I saw it on the wikipedia page for “Toddler”
Lincoln Mullen: The Spread of U.S. Slavery
Chapter 1 of The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a Paul Erdos memoir.
Some information on academic salaries, courtesy of SamR’s Assorted Musings:
- aaup compensation survey
- Chronical’s estimates (which don’t always match up with aaup) and “peer institution” database
- Also, the base pay of people on h1b visa’s is more or less publically viewable.
In a 1954 lecture, Dennis Robertson asked “What Does the Economist Economize?”, to which his answer was “love”. There are various cynical interpretations of this floating around, but I really appreciated Prof. Chari’s at the recent graduation ceremony: that we must save our love for those close to us and for the most needy, and that we run much of the world with cold things like markets so that our loving attention may be focused on those who need it most. Can’t find the full original lecture online, but here’s a very short page with a snippet.
Uncensor any LLM with abliteration. A blog post where they are able to fine tune a llama llm to get rid of its censorious impulses by identifying the “direction” in which those impulses point.
Previous
- Examples of Unintended Consequences
- Most recent example in this blog’s feed is the FDA labelling sesame seeds as a major allergen. There are now big fines for putting sesame seeds in food where it isn’t listed as an ingredient. The result? Firms start adding a pinch of sesame to everything just so they can put it on the ingredient label.
- This jacana leg situation
- The jacana is a wading bird with doting fathers. A male Jacana will carry his chicks around under his wings.
- Cameron’s World
- A web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of GeoCities.
- Causal Inference for The Brave and True
- A clearly written online textbook, with example python codes, and plenty of humor. Fantastic stuff. Mostly deals with the estimation of average treatment effects.
- The Medieval Bestiary
- Well-referenced site with details about medieval european beliefs about beasts, both real and mythical.
- The pages on real animals, detailing bizarres misconceptions, are my favorites. Here’s the page on elephants, for example.
- Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1672)
- An interesting old document in which Sir Thomas Browne writes long essays about the common misconceptions that annoy him. Also contains the first recorded instance of the word “electricity”.
- An example: Book 3, chapter 21 carefully argues against the popular belief that Chameleons survive on air alone and don’t need to eat any food.
- There’s also an accompanying document, written as a rebuttal to Browne. Including, yes, an argument that chameleons totally just need air to survive and that the reason they eat flies is for… uh… for fun?
- Literally Imagine Dragons
- A blog post in which the first half is an educational description of porphyrins, and the second half is bonkers speculation about fire-breathing stegasaurs.
- infrastructure that looks like sci fi
- Brain Maps
- Zoomable, hi-res images of tissue cross sections. Some of the images let you zoom in far enough to see individual cells.
- Wikimedia Gallery of Medieval Diagrams
- Nine Degrees Below Photography
- color management, photography and painting using free/libre software. Articles about color spaces and the like. Probably more detail than you’d ever need to know.
- Jason Davies
- Lots of interesting visualizations, mostly of maps.
- Erich Friedman
- Math Puzzles and visualizations
- Flags of the World
- A website about flags. It’s hideous. I love it. See, for example, municipal flags of Kansas. Overland Park’s flag redesign is especially baffling.
- Worldbuilding Pasta
- Incredibly detailed blog posts about geographic features, and how to invent realistic geography for imaginary planets.
- Ming the Clam
- At 507 years old, Ming was the longest-lived individual animal. This fact wasn’t discovered until after Ming was frozen and killed.
- Twitter’s Whistleblower Report
- There has been much ado over twitter drama since Elon Musk took over the company. But much more shocking and less talked about are the allegations made by a whistleblower back in July 2022. Twitter threads with highlights: 1, 2. Among other things, Twitter was apparently doing development on the production environment.
- Heavy Boots
- Vertical Castling
- The rules of chess used to allow a King to Castle with a newly promoted pawn.
- Five Problems With Chess
- A game designer’s complaints about the rules of chess. The highlight is a vulgar rant about En Passant
- Life Without Your Cerebellum
- I knew that the cerebellum was responsible for ‘muscle memory’, but I didn’t know that it contains half of your brain cells and “has some role in coordinating social stimuli as well as motor”. If a person is born without a cerebellum, they can adapt and survive, but will be clumsy and socially stunted.
- The Commodordion
- A Functioning electronic accordion built from two Commodore 64 computers.
- Let’s Learn About Waveforms
- A short essay about sound with interactive visualizations (auralizations?)
- H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index
- Uber has a clever system for implementing a hex-grid tiling of Earth’s surface. If you remember your geometry, you know there must also be 12 pentagons in the mix. Uber uses the Dymaxion orientation to place the center of each pentagon in the ocean. Another link. And here is a python script which generates h3 shapefiles in QGIS.
- TensorFlow Playground
- Interactive visualization of an Neural Network as it learns.