L33t Links: Unbacklog Edition
Needless to say, I should post about interesting things I find more frequently instead of fishing through my backlog for an entire year.
Technology and Mathematics
The new way of passing the Turing test is to have humans pretend to be AI.
Who Was Ramanujan - Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha fame) tells the story of one of an unlikely mathematician (and the subject of a recent biopic). Really interesting stuff.
Urbanism and Transit
How Japanese zoning laws avoid many of the problems of US zoning.
Navigating NYC with a guidebook from 1899.
How to save the MBTA $100M a year: Fix paratransit, subcontract bus maintenance, cut administration.
On state-level funding of urban mass-transit, and why this is about rural-urban political conflict.
An old post with an interesting idea for modifying urban development proposal contests.
"Nations aren't the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are."
The king of the frequent fliers.
Food and Medicine
Why almost all eggnog sold in the US violates FDA regulations, and why that's not technically illegal.
Why the cure for scurvy was widely known in Europe in the 1700s, but not known by polar explorers in the early 1900s.
An amusing post on pharma company sneakiness, with a great post title.
More Recent Politics
Why Sanders Trails Clinton Among Minority Voters: It has a lot to do with Obama.
Why didn't Bernie Sanders raise any money for the DNC? Short version: Clinton is there to do it for him.
What Would a Trump Victory Tell Us About the Republican Party? The article proposes several possibilities about what pundits and politicians may have gotten wrong in underestimating the chances of a Trump victory. Very interesting to look back at this January post a few months later.
The Smug Style in American Liberalism: Accurately characterized on Reddit as Vox Voxsplains Itself.
Technology and Mathematics
The new way of passing the Turing test is to have humans pretend to be AI.
Who Was Ramanujan - Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha fame) tells the story of one of an unlikely mathematician (and the subject of a recent biopic). Really interesting stuff.
Urbanism and Transit
How Japanese zoning laws avoid many of the problems of US zoning.
Navigating NYC with a guidebook from 1899.
How to save the MBTA $100M a year: Fix paratransit, subcontract bus maintenance, cut administration.
On state-level funding of urban mass-transit, and why this is about rural-urban political conflict.
An old post with an interesting idea for modifying urban development proposal contests.
"Nations aren't the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are."
The king of the frequent fliers.
Food and Medicine
Why almost all eggnog sold in the US violates FDA regulations, and why that's not technically illegal.
Why the cure for scurvy was widely known in Europe in the 1700s, but not known by polar explorers in the early 1900s.
An amusing post on pharma company sneakiness, with a great post title.
More Recent Politics
Why Sanders Trails Clinton Among Minority Voters: It has a lot to do with Obama.
Why didn't Bernie Sanders raise any money for the DNC? Short version: Clinton is there to do it for him.
What Would a Trump Victory Tell Us About the Republican Party? The article proposes several possibilities about what pundits and politicians may have gotten wrong in underestimating the chances of a Trump victory. Very interesting to look back at this January post a few months later.
The Smug Style in American Liberalism: Accurately characterized on Reddit as Vox Voxsplains Itself.