This week’s roundup is a little more full than other weeks! Here are my favorite links from the week:
- Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration
- The Birth and Death of Javascript (oldie but goodie)
- Lessons from Spotify by Ben Thompson (TL;DR: Music streaming companies have high COGS compared to SaaS companies because of their licensing of music from record labels)
- Astronomy picture of the day: The Hubble Deep Field w/ corresponding hover-music
- One bad employee can corrupt a whole team (I have witnessed this)
- There is a New DDOS Reflection-Attack Variant that exploits memcached to amplify DDoS attacks
- QUIC as a solution to protocol ossification
- Architecture of Messner Museum Kronplatz
- FastMail: Email is your electronic memory
- For years, I’ve used a Bullet Journal, Notes.app, and a categorized Dropbox folder with PDFs of web pages to accomplish what I now understand to be a sort of Commonplace book.
- Pocket notebooks of 20 famous men
- Learn faster with The Feynman Technique
- Which should we teach first: iterative methods or recursion?
- An imagined dialogue about database tables
- Woah: You can have emotions you don’t feel
- Why the PDF Is Secretly the World’s Most Important File Format
- This (pretentious, posturing) post about the negative effects of modern online discourse
- Imagine a world with politicized shopping (this makes me shudder, but it sounds rather close to reality). My favorite excerpt: “In Silicon Valley, some of the biggest companies are torn between the imperative to maximize revenue and the left-leaning political demands of their employees”. I have many more thoughts but I’ll save them for a future blog post.
- A…weird…interesting post about the case for making chimp/human chimeras
Some recommended videos:
- New Primitive Technology video: Lime (7m)
- Tracking Stars Orbiting the Milky Way’s Central Black Hole (3m) – It is always amazing to me how videos like this look so strikingly similar to small particles in a liquid under a microscope
- I’ve always loved Doug Engelbart’s original demo, and I wasn’t disappointed when I found another one from 1969 (34m)
- I met someone from the UK this week and reviewed The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England (5m)
- Time lapse of ants forming a bridge (24s)
- This video never ceases to fascinate me: Visualizing the waves of light particles using a trillion-frame-per-second camera (3m) – In the video, light moves less than 1 mm per frame, so you can see it propagate
I’ve been on an Internet History Podcast kick lately. I highly recommend this podcast if you believe that history repeats itself and would like to learn more about the history of our industry. Here are some of my favorite episodes from the last several weeks:
- Rob Malda on the history of Slashdot
- Facebook’s first senior software engineer, Karel Baloun
- Mike Slade on 80s Microsoft, Next, Starwave, and Steve’s return to Apple
- Don Melton on the early Safari / Webkit project (and Netscape)
- The Napster story with Jordan Ritter
- Chamath Palihapitiya On Facebook, Aim And Winamp
- CompuServe’s founder Jeff Wilkins
- Mike Levy, founder of CBS Sportsline
- The History of Google
- The founding of eBay and eBay wins
- The Rise of AOL
And, I finished reading Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Startup that Took on Microsoft by Jim Clark. (I liked it a lot!)
I’m ravenous about finding interesting, original things to read, listen to, and watch. I’d love to hear from you if you have interesting links.
Have a great weekend!
