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”)
Radical Cartography - Cool website with lots of maps and map projections.
Females in the Labor Force 1880-2000 - Someone told me that women’s labor force participation initially fell as production shifted towards manufacturing before rising again in the late 20th century. Census data back to 1880 doesn’t exhibit that pattern EXCEPT for non-white non-married women, but plausibly they were the last subset of women who experienced the dip. Verdict on the original claim: ehhh, maybe? Would be interested in a time series that goes back farther.
Jianpu rendition of Take Me Home, Country Roads - Don’t remember why I bookmarked this. I think because Eddie got a little toy piano mat?
The Suez canal was first built around 1850 BC. It was filled in around 779 and wasn’t rebuilt until the 1860s.
Dualshock - Wikipedia - The PS2 controller basically codified the set of inputs on modern game controllers, but one feature that nobody else copied was the fact that all of the buttons are pressure sensitive and allow for analog inputs. Odd, never noticed this as a kid.
Studies in Intelligence - The CIA has a magazine, apparently. Found a link to this issue when reading about Lumumba.
This might explain a curious fact: The Lumumba story resonates more widely outside the Congo than in it. There is no Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Kinshasa, only in Moscow (its European accreditation was suspended after the Russian invasion of Ukraine). An award-winning film about Lumumba’s life was produced and directed by a Haitian. No statue of Lumumba presides over Kinshasa’s main thoroughfare, Boulevard 30 juin, even though no one had a bigger role than Lumumba in making that date meaningful in the nation’s history. He has no namesakes in major cities or airports and his name is rarely evoked by Kinshasa’s political leaders today. Lumumba is a symbol, but, preoccupied with the daily challenges of survival, not for most Congolese.
Thecodontia - Cool dino skeleton illstrations.
Ivar the Boneless - Historical viking. Stories disagree about why he was called “boneless”.
The Great Frost of 1683 - Wikipedia - Worst winter in British history froze the River Thames. Upside: great opportunity to have a party on the river.
I noticed that South Dakota and Missouri use little chibi versions of their state outline on road signs. It turns out each state has it’s own state highway symbol. The creativity varies quite a bit.
Dungeons & Dragons taught me how to write alt text – Eric Bailey
The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins / Jordan Eldredge
Henneguya zschokkei - wikipedia - “It is the only known multicellular animal that does not require oxygen to survive.” - Basically a jellyfish that evolved into a tumor.
Related: our friend henneguya is likely an example of a SCANDAL, a Speciated-by-CANcer-Development AnimaL
Power Thesaurus - Much broader and more useful than a traditional thesaurus. Fun to play around with.
Seven Sages. See also.Seven Sages of Greece - Wikipedia
- Thales of Miletus, the first philosopher,
- Pittacus of Mytilene, the tyrant reformer,
- Bias of Priene, the greatest of advocates,
- Solon of Athens, who laid the foundation for its democracy,
- and Chilon of Sparta.
Then there’s a lot of disagreement about who else should be included in the list. I feel like if these guys showed up in an anime, they’d throw in Pythagoras and Aesop.
The lost empire of Tartaria - for people who think Atlantis is too mundane of a story. A lost empire sinking into the sea? Nah, how about a lost empire sinking into the dirt?
Konjac - Wisconsin Horticulture - Strange plant, cousin to the corpse lilly. We got a couple of these from Augsberg and I’m trying to follow the advice on this page to keep them alive.
How bad is maternal mortality in the U.S.? A new study says it’s been overestimated - there was a change in how deaths are reported, so the supposed increase in US maternal mortality over time and relative to other countries is just a an artifact of inconsistent data definitions. Measuring things is hard.
Meth. We’re On It. - a rather… creative slogan for an anti-drug campaign.
Pink and White Terraces - Wikipedia - A natural wonder of New Zealand which unfortunately got exploded and/or buried by a volcano.
Dali’s Dream Tapestry - art exhibit which creates a big AI generated collage from visitor prompts
The spread of US slavery, 1790-1860
How wild turkeys went from extinct to everywhere in Minnesota - Turkey populations were wiped out in MN, but after several attempts, they were successfully reintroduced from the Ozarks. Additional articles: How Minnesota almost lost its wild turkeys, “Turkeys”
Hornbostel–Sachs - Wikipedia - like the Dewey decimal system but for instruments. “Idiophone” is a fun word.
Jimmy Carter rabbit incident - a swamp rabbit tried to sink his boat.
Why the People of Vietnam Have Surprisingly Warm Views of Americans, Despite the History
Vizzy vizzy vizzy viz - a cool, but hard to read, visualization of world output
Google released a report about their medical diagnostic AI, AIME - Provocative result: the graph reports that the AI by itself did better than either doctors on their own, or doctors with AI assistance. The text of the article seems to dance around that result, and it’s best not to extrapolate performance on one very specific test, but still… quite provocative.
Comptroller Stringer: Cost of Incarceration per Person in New York City Skyrockets to All-Time High - In NYC in 2021, it cost over half a million dollars to keep someone in jail for a year.
Is Grad School Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis - Claim: JDs and MDs have ROI above a million, masters in something like nursing or comp sci has ROI over half a million. But many graduate degrees, including the typical MBA, have negative ROI once you account for the opportunity cost.
Terminus (god) - Wikipedia - a Roman god I hadn’t heard of before, basically a personification of property lines. Sometimes identified as an aspect of Jupiter.
Teddy Roosevelt’s Bold (But Doomed) Battle to Change American Spelling - In response to German spelling standardization and reform, Teddy Roosevelt advocated for similar changes to English. Some caught on – we write “jail” instead of “gaol”, “draft” instead of “draught” – but the suggestion to replaced “-ed” suffixes with a “t” was widely ridiculed.
A Tax Rule Change Is Threatening the Survival of Some Businesses (October, 2023) - In brief, R&D is tax deductible, but gov said you now have to spread out those deductions over 5 years. Some R&D-heavy firms were faced with a tax bill larger than their actual profits. Especially troublesome: the law change also says software development counts as R&D now. The tech job market was TERRIBLE in the 2023-24 job search season, and I’d guess this is a big part of the reason why.
iTOL: Interactive Tree Of Life -Visualizer for those circular cladogram things. Alas, doesn’t come preloaded with the whole tree of life. Still had fun playing with it for a couple minutes.
Three Million Acres Traded for the Austin Texas Capitol - One of the largest barter transactions in history. Texas’ state capitol building was paid for not with land. This article had some other examples of large-scale barter: When Pepsi was swapped for Soviet warships - BBC
Reddit user SerialStateLineXer provides some plausible explanations of a couple strange patterns observed during the pandemic - labor productivity rose as layoffs and shutdowns affected primarily lower-productivity industries, while an observed decline in median household income probably reflects, well, a couple things crammed together.
The Quote Investigator - This guy’s passion is finding quotes attributed to famous people and saying “No, they did not say that.”
Links from the hospital, back in August 2023: Ah, these promote some bittersweet memories. Based on the timing, I must have saved these links on my phone on the days surrounding my son’s birth.
- Arrest of Active Labor - OB-GYN 101 - The jargon for what happened was that our delivery was complicated by absolute feto-pelvic disproportion. He got stuck. He was in the perfect position and everything; he was just a tiny bit too big. Dilation paused at around 9cm. As per the last paragraph, my wife then went through a “trial of labor”, which meant she spent 30 hours waiting to see if the baby could squeeze out. That didn’t work and so we had to go to C-Section.
- Safe Prevention of the Primary Cesarean Delivery | ACOG - C-sections are scary; they’re a major surgery! So naturally you hope that things will just resolve themselves. One of the things I found while frantically trying to do a literature survey in the birthing room is that in the US, doctors often turn to C-sections too readily, and are too quick to say that labor has been arrested. For new mothers, it isn’t uncommon for labor to take 20 hours or more. … Maybe that means we’ll be fine just waiting a bit longer? But alas, scroll down to the recommendations table, and it turns out our doctors were following the new, more conservative guidelines. And after eight hours with no dilation progress, things were pretty conclusive: the baby was stuck.
- GetWellNetwork Games - Fortunately, the C-section went well. We had a few days in a hospital suite to recover, and there was a tablet provided with some janky games. None of the games are really very good, but I had fun figuring out how to view the url for the webapp the tablet was accessing.
- I have a couple saved links from this time to the python Polars graphing library and its user guide. I had plans to get some work done on my job market paper in the hospital. But of course, that was a terribly silly thing to plan on.
- Manufacturing a Backyard Hydrogen Generator: Update 3 - No, I don’t know why I though this link was important to save while I was in the hospital. No, I don’t think I even read any of the other articles in the series. Sleep deprivation is the most likely culprit.
Scott Aaronson’s Big Number Talk - An essay that escalates from asking kids to write big numbers on the board:
The kid on the left writes something like: 999999999
While the kid on the right writes something like: 11111111111111111 Looking at these, I comment: 9 is bigger than 1, but 1 is a bit faster to write, and as you can see that makes the difference here!
to
Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that, if you try to hold a name-the-biggest-number contest between two actual professionals who are trying to win, it will (alas) degenerate into an argument about the axioms of set theory.
I mostly remember it for the mention of well defined numbers (BB(n) for n > 1000) whose value cannot be proven, even in theory.
U.S. officials confirm first known interstellar meteor struck Earth in 2014
Johnson Solids are convex polyhedra with regular faces and equal edge lengths. If you’re playing around with those magnet-stick bulding toys, here’s a list of the things you can make.
Vertical Castling in Chess? A puzzle that forced FIDE to change the chess rules - Remote Chess Academy - Promote a pawn to a rook, castle with the new rook.
Consumer Revolution - Wikipedia - The period 1600 to 1750 when mass consumption of consumer goods became common in England.
Antebellum Puzzle - Wikipedia - In the 1840s and 1850s, the height of the US adult male population decreased, likely due to decreased per-capita food consumption. This happened because although there was an increase in agricultural productivity, population was also growing quickly, and because the biggest improvements to productivity were for non-food crops like cotton and tobacco, raising the opportunity cost of growing food.
Cockerel / Rooster sounds from around the world - Omniglot - Do roosters say cock-a-doodle-doo, gu gu gu, or cocoroco? See also: Thingamajig in many languages. dōngxī, dingus, widget, whatsit, burungo, bazinga, and various other whiff-whaff.
Nüshu - the syllabic script used exclusively by women in Hunan, China - Developed because women were not allowed access to formal education. The characters are embroiderable.
Measure problem (cosmology) - Wikipedia - Multiverse nonsense.
Edict on Maximum Prices - Wikipedia - A law from 301 AD. Has a list of prices for hundreds of different goods: beef, wine, sausages, lions. (Was largely ignored a few years later. Price controls really aren’t a great solution to inflation.)
New Zealand’s west coast is rich with dark black “iron sand”. The iron is impure enough to require special refining processes, but pure enough to visibly be attracted to a magnet.
FRB: Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist? - Claim from 2010: there’s little empirical relation between money multiplier and lending
the assumed link in the textbook version of the money multiplier between the creation of loans and the creation of demand deposits is dubious. According to the standard multiplier theory, an increase in bank lending is associated with an increase in demand deposits. The data as discussed below do not reflect any such link
The text spends time arguing that reserve requirements are not a good tool for directly controlling the money supply, but also that the idea of the money multiplier being connected to total lending at all is empirically dubious. The latter claim is very provocative, and suggests I need to heavily rethink what I cover in my principles course.
Now we’re getting into really old links from my phone. I notice as I go back further, the few of the saved links I bother to transfer here.
Aytu BioScience Signs Exclusive Global License with Cedars-Sinai for Potential Coronavirus Treatment - I think this particular idea got transmitted through a game of telephone and turned into headlines about Trump saying we should drink bleach to cure Covid? I’m trying to remember why I saved this and I think it had something to do with finding it interesting how Trump misunderstood what the scientists were saying and the press misunderstood what Trump was saying?
Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine - This one doesn’t need explanation. It’s still really cool.
Harry Potter Book Cover from Around the Worlds - blogspot, what a throwback
Batman TAS Definitive Episode Timeline - An attempt to sensibly chronologically order an episode of an episodic, non-chronologically airing show. Never got around to watching this.
Ballantine scale - Wikipedia - a way of quantifying wave intensity on a shore based on what critters live there.
WikiLeaks: Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed - Excerpt:
Japanese style Faces
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Toadstone - Wikipedia - “The toadstone, also known as bufonite (from Latin bufo, “toad”), is a mythical stone or gem that was thought to be found in the head of a toad. “
Mirrlees Review - Institute For Fiscal Studies - IFS - Recommendations for how to lay out a tax system, if you could start from scratch.
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.