L33t Links: WALL OF TEXT Edition
Been ages since I did a links post, so here's some of the best of the web since last time:
A bunch of Overthinking It essays: One on Starship Troopers (on why critics got it wrong), one on Fantastic Mr. Fox (a Freudian analysis), one on Avatar (the James Cameron sci-fi movie; starts off slow but then gets brilliant at the end). For those of you who don't read Overthinking It, it's a great site for those who like literary criticism applied to things that often aren't looked at through that lens.
A comic, Mysteries of Public Transit, mainly because I identify far to much with point 3. Subnormality is a great comic (for those who like their comics to be WALLS OF TEXT).
An 18-minute video essay on the world's most important six-second drum loop. Actually rather fascinating.
Every two years, Robert Jensen writes an essay on how much he hates Thanksgiving. Here's his offering for this year.
Here's an essay titled Can Videogames Be Our Friends. Yeah, it's about Japan.
Here's a post explaining why only an infinitesimal subset of all numbers can be described. Speaking of things which can't be counted, here's some crazy's argument that the real numbers are countable, and a rather entertaining takedown of that essay.
Finally, here's a news piece on one of my favorite charities, Kiva.org. Evidently, there's some confusion about how the site actually works, some people were surprised to learn that money can be loaned out before a loan is marked as "funded". To be clear, it's not necessarily your money that goes out to the entrepreneur in question. Rather, your funds secure the loan in question, if the loan is not paid back, you take the loss, rather than the microlending institution. That spreads their risk, so they can keep on lending. As long as every loan funded through Kiva is actually disbursed to the entrepreneurs by someone, and as long as Kiva lenders are repaid when the loan they agreed to secure is repaid, Kiva is living up to their end of the bargain.
A few brief bonus links for those of you not yet put to sleep:
A bunch of Overthinking It essays: One on Starship Troopers (on why critics got it wrong), one on Fantastic Mr. Fox (a Freudian analysis), one on Avatar (the James Cameron sci-fi movie; starts off slow but then gets brilliant at the end). For those of you who don't read Overthinking It, it's a great site for those who like literary criticism applied to things that often aren't looked at through that lens.
A comic, Mysteries of Public Transit, mainly because I identify far to much with point 3. Subnormality is a great comic (for those who like their comics to be WALLS OF TEXT).
An 18-minute video essay on the world's most important six-second drum loop. Actually rather fascinating.
Every two years, Robert Jensen writes an essay on how much he hates Thanksgiving. Here's his offering for this year.
Here's an essay titled Can Videogames Be Our Friends. Yeah, it's about Japan.
Here's a post explaining why only an infinitesimal subset of all numbers can be described. Speaking of things which can't be counted, here's some crazy's argument that the real numbers are countable, and a rather entertaining takedown of that essay.
Finally, here's a news piece on one of my favorite charities, Kiva.org. Evidently, there's some confusion about how the site actually works, some people were surprised to learn that money can be loaned out before a loan is marked as "funded". To be clear, it's not necessarily your money that goes out to the entrepreneur in question. Rather, your funds secure the loan in question, if the loan is not paid back, you take the loss, rather than the microlending institution. That spreads their risk, so they can keep on lending. As long as every loan funded through Kiva is actually disbursed to the entrepreneurs by someone, and as long as Kiva lenders are repaid when the loan they agreed to secure is repaid, Kiva is living up to their end of the bargain.
A few brief bonus links for those of you not yet put to sleep:
- Japanese people mortified by crazy US media.
- Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML or Cthulu will devour your soul.
- One of the most dramatic examples of missing the point I have ever seen.
- "Thinking about your own beliefs" and "thinking about God's beliefs" look suspiciously similar on an MRI.