Weekly roundup

Here are my favorite links from the week:

  1. A long but fascinating read into our 16th President’s mental state and how it influenced his administration: Lincoln’s Great Depression
  2. Why don’t trees touch each other more?
  3. Twitter thread about One woman’s grad school #metoo moment
  4. I think about this a lot: Everyone Has An Opinion About Government But Many Citizens Would Flunk Civics
  5. Yikes. TL;DR: Publishing malicious packages and getting developers to adopt them by issuing rogue PRs: I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.
  6. Software engineering as industrial design: Consider the bicycle
  7. A very cool, interactive post about special relativity: Inside Einstein’s head: an explorable explanation of relativistic spacetime
  8. Doomsday Prep for the Super-rich
  9. Astronomy picture of the day: Clouds of Andromeda
  10. One person’s opinion on Why the rewards for ambitious problem solving are about to get bigger
  11. A weekly digest from the winter keeper at Yellowstone National Park: A Life in Wonderland
  12. One person’s reflection on how hiking the Appalachian Trail changed her life
  13. Ever wonder How emoji are born?
  14. The Oatmeal: Multiplicative Idiocy. I have been in these meetings.
  15. I believe the highest leverage problem to solve in K-12 education today is fixing teacher tenure & comp. Here’s a blurb about how teacher collective bargaining harms student outcomes.
  16. YC published a decent overview for new developers on Building for the blockchain
  17. A neat writeup of the parallels and differences between today’s opioid addiction and the 19th century’s
  18. The original notes on Albert Hofman’s discovery of LSD
  19. After reading Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial, and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?, I’m considering how to even further reduce my usage.
  20. Red Dawn in Lapland is a good reminder of the history of Russia’s military activity (and WWII history)
  21. Is President Trump Above the Law? (FiveThirtyEight)
  22. An excellent David Brooks opinion piece: The Decline of Anti-Trumpism
  23. Tesla Model 3: The First Serious Review
  24. An early investor in FB wrote How to Fix Facebook — Before It Fixes Us and while I disagree with much of it (FB will never relinquish control of their user data!) it was an interesting read
  25. Excellent graphic essay about the relationship between WW2 and 9/11
  26. A great post on old english writing: Why do we continue to torture ESL students with bizarrities like the sentence “a rough coughing thoughtful ploughman from Scarborough bought tough dough in Slough”?
  27. The stages one woman went through when returning from a long-term backpacking trip
  28. FiveThirtyEight reports that It’s probably not possible to end Gerrymandering

Have a great weekend!