Here are my favorite links from the week:
- A long but fascinating read into our 16th President’s mental state and how it influenced his administration: Lincoln’s Great Depression
- Why don’t trees touch each other more?
- Twitter thread about One woman’s grad school #metoo moment
- I think about this a lot: Everyone Has An Opinion About Government But Many Citizens Would Flunk Civics
- 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.
- Software engineering as industrial design: Consider the bicycle
- A very cool, interactive post about special relativity: Inside Einstein’s head: an explorable explanation of relativistic spacetime
- Doomsday Prep for the Super-rich
- Astronomy picture of the day: Clouds of Andromeda
- One person’s opinion on Why the rewards for ambitious problem solving are about to get bigger
- A weekly digest from the winter keeper at Yellowstone National Park: A Life in Wonderland
- One person’s reflection on how hiking the Appalachian Trail changed her life
- Ever wonder How emoji are born?
- The Oatmeal: Multiplicative Idiocy. I have been in these meetings.
- 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.
- YC published a decent overview for new developers on Building for the blockchain
- A neat writeup of the parallels and differences between today’s opioid addiction and the 19th century’s
- The original notes on Albert Hofman’s discovery of LSD
- 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.
- Red Dawn in Lapland is a good reminder of the history of Russia’s military activity (and WWII history)
- Is President Trump Above the Law? (FiveThirtyEight)
- An excellent David Brooks opinion piece: The Decline of Anti-Trumpism
- Tesla Model 3: The First Serious Review
- 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
- Excellent graphic essay about the relationship between WW2 and 9/11
- 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”?
- The stages one woman went through when returning from a long-term backpacking trip
- FiveThirtyEight reports that It’s probably not possible to end Gerrymandering
Have a great weekend!