articles.md

Society and Philosophy

• Life ≠ alive | Aeon

  On a sofa in the corner of the room, a cat is purring. It seems obvious that the cat is an example of life, whereas the sofa itself is not.

• Knowledge is a stone-age concept, we're better off without it | Aeon

  I’m against knowledge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as keen on the facts as the next person. I’m no friend of fake news. I want truth rather than falsity. It is specifically knowledge I’m against, not true belief. Knowledge asks more of us than true belief, and it isn’t worth it.

• Social science has a complicated, infinitely tricky replication crisis | Ars Technica

  For scientists, getting research published in the journal Nature is a huge deal. It carries weight, prestige, and the promise of career advancement—as do the pages of its competitor, Science. Both have a reputation for publishing innovative, exciting, and high-quality work with a broad appeal.

• There’s a debate raging in science about what should count as “significant” | Ars Technica

  Psychology and many related fields are in the midst of what can be viewed as a coming-of-age crisis. Following a stream of depressing revelations about a lack of reliability in the field, lots of researchers are dedicating themselves to improving the discipline’s rigor.

• The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture | The New Yorker

  Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey.

• The demise of the nation state | The Guardian

  After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete – and spasms of resurgent nationalism are a sign of its irreversible decline.

• Why Chinese Speakers Cut Their Hair Before New Year’s

  Every year, more than a billion people around the world celebrate Chinese New Year and engage in a subtle linguistic dance with luck. You can think of it as a set of holiday rituals that resemble a courtship.

• How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) - Wait But Why

• The Interpreter | The New Yorker

  One morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, and I stepped from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach bordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon.

• The Silencing of the Deaf

  Eleanor Reid was two days old when a tech tested her cochlea. The screening is routine for all newborns, and ideally it’s conducted while the baby sleeps.

• A Short History of “Hack” | The New Yorker

  A psychologist wants to tell us how to “hack the happiness molecule.” The Web site Lifehacker offers tips on “how to install a laundry chute,” “make a DIY rapid-fire mouse button,” and “how to stop giving a f*ck what people think.” Online marketers desperately want to “growth hack.

• I grew up believing I was bad at math

• The Intelligent Plant | The New Yorker

  In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.

• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

  In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right.

• Galactic-Scale Energy

  Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have seen an impressive and sustained growth in the scale of energy consumption by human civilization. Plotting data from the Energy Information Agency on U.S.

• Yitang Zhang’s Pursuit of Beauty in Math | The New Yorker

  I don’t see what difference it can make now to reveal that I passed high-school math only because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations and x’s and y’s.

• You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?

  There’s no helpline for pedophiles who want treatment before they act. So a teen with a terrible secret had to find his own way to save…

• City Of Water - The New Yorker

  No one knows how many sandhogs are, at any given moment, working beneath the streets of New York City, but one morning this winter half a dozen men could be spotted gathering around a hole on the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street.

• How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?

  Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous.

  [...he] is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaptation,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter.

• How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers | Aeon Essays

  Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest.

• The Doomsday Invention

  Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom

• Hiroshima | The New Yorker

  At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office

• Utopian for Beginners | The New Yorker

  An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.

• The L.E.D. Quandary: Why There’s No Such Thing as “Built to Last”

  The light bulb that has brightened the fire-department garage in Livermore, California, for the past hundred and fifteen years will not burn out. Instead, it will “expire.” When it does, it certainly won’t be thrown out. It will be “laid to rest.”

• Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future - Wait But Why

• Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - The Atlantic

  You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published.

• The Case Against Civilization

  Science and technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of STEM (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”).

• The World Is Running Out of Sand

• Keepers of the Secrets | Village Voice

  I was told that the most interesting man in the world works in the archives division of the New York Public Library, and so I went there, one morning this summer, to meet him.

• Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart

Tech

Business Analysis

• Defining Aggregators

• Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement - Gwern.net

  Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers

• Strategy Letter V – Joel on Software

  Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

• Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder | Ars Technica

  Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the story of Xerox inventing the modern personal computer in the 1970s and then failing to commercialize it effectively.

• Google Maps’s Moat

  Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities. Take my childhood neighborhood in rural Illinois.

• Why and How to Model a Non-profit on the Lean Canvas

  I often get asked if one can or should model a non-profit using a Lean Canvas. The answer is a resounding yes. A nonprofit is essentially a multisided model made up of users (beneficiaries) and customers (donors).

• A Regulatory Framework for the Internet – Stratechery

  This week, when the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Secretary of State for the Home Department released a white paper calling for significantly increased regulation for tech companies, the scope of the debate was predictable.

• Camels and Rubber Duckies – Joel on Software

  One of the biggest questions you’re going to be asking now is, “How much should I charge for my software?”

  ... those 12 fine souls who would have paid a full $399, and yet, we’re only charging them $220 just like everyone else! The difference between $399 and $220, i.e., $179, is called consumer surplus.

  There’s no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I’ll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 [...] you need to send a salesperson out to the customer.

• Stripe Atlas: Software as a Service, as a business

  Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a billing and delivery model for software which is so superior to the traditional method for selling software licenses that it restructures businesses around itself. This has led SaaS businesses to have a distinct body of practice.

• The Tyranny of Stuctureless

  The earliest version of this article was given as a talk at a conference called by the Southern Female Rights Union, held in Beulah, Mississippi in May 1970.

• The Epistemology of Truth – by a developer that worked on the Google Knowledge Graph

Hands-on

• Code Ownership – Who Should Own the Code? - DZone Agile

  A key decision in building and managing any development team is agreeing on how ownership of the code will be divided up: who is going to work on what code; how much work can be, and should be, shared across the team; and who will be responsible for code quality.

• Why Dependently Typed Programming Will (One Day) Rock Your World

  You can #timestamp it, folks. I’ve seen the future, and it’s dependently typed. We won’t merely teach the homeless to code. Rather, me and you and everyone we know will have a whole new framework in which to think, learn, and interact with the world.

• Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown

  In this tutorial, you will first learn the basics of Markdown—an easy to read and write markup syntax for plain text—as well as Pandoc, a command line tool that converts plain text into a number of beautifully formatted file types: PDF, .docx, HTML, LaTeX, slide decks, and more.

• Multichannel Text Processing

  In the classic era of word processing, text was born between MS Word and a printer. Today, it is written and edited on multiple devices and apps, then mailed, printed, copied, pasted, annotated, published, RSSed, shared and re-shared, using all kinds of tools and platforms.

Were computers a mistake?

• Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster | Tim Harford

  We increasingly let computers fly planes and carry out security checks. Driverless cars are next. But is our reliance on automation dangerously diminishing our skills?

• The Coming Software Apocalypse

  There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house.

• Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble - The New York Times

  The sequence of words is meaningless: a random array strung together by an algorithm let loose in an English dictionary. What makes them valuable is that they’ve been generated exclusively for me, by a software tool called MetaMask. In the lingo of cryptography, they’re known as my seed phrase.

• Reddit and the Quest to Detoxify the Internet | The New Yorker

  Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook.

• Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind | by Tamsin Shaw | The New York Review

  We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable.

Space

• Why Explore Space?

  In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars.

• Want faster data and a cleaner planet? Start mining asteroids | Aeon

  Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real.

• Steam-powered spacecraft could jump-start asteroid exploration | MIT Technology Review

  When the idea of asteroid mining was first booming, many of the firms involved talked about using water-based fuels to power their spacecraft. The idea was that ice was so abundant on asteroids that it could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen to make a more efficient fuel.

• Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy, John S. Lewis (2014)