My favorite links this week:
- Despite pennies and nickels costing more than they’re worth to mint, the US Mint can treat them as a loss leader
- Why Forests Give you Awe
- Skripal’s poisoning and the conflict with the UK shuffled the cards in the Russian presidential election
- Uber halts autonomous cars after a death in Arizona (remember, 100 people die every day from car crashes)
- YouTube will add wikipedia information to conspiracy videos
- The seven biggest lies Theranos told – Big caveat, IMO: the presence of the PR industry means that the average reader can’t tell real journalism from a PR piece, and thus can’t know if it’s been fact-checked!
- 6 ways to counteract your smartphone addiction
- A cool world map with the literal names of countries
- A Lifelong Sportsman Writes His Congressional Delegation About Guns
- Why SQLite is coded in C
- A good Rands post on performance management
- Teenagers continue to show us age doesn’t matter when it comes to computer security
- I Can’t (Quite) Teach JavaScript – I agree with this wholeheartedly
- Prattfalls: Better Communication – My favorite quote: “it’s useful to enter a moment of communication — one where I’m going to mutate another person’s internal image— with care and consideration, starting with being thoughtful about the present state of that image, being clear about what change I’m trying to accomplish, and figuring out what the best, most likely successful, way to communicate that will lead to the desired change in state.”
- Ideas that changed my life
- How to make better use of everything you read
- A quick-and-dirty analysis of a twitter botnet
- Salt-Water Fish Extinction by 2048 – Yikes
- Event-Driven Architecture
- A PhilosophyNow article by a PhD student studying MOQ: Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality
- Every organization has three structures, not one
- The cost center trap
- Why America Slept
- How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire
- At Davos, Big Tech Is Waiting for Its Grace Period to Run Out
- A crazy story about debugging in the Soviet Union
Videos:
- An extremely early (1972) video of Alan Kay discussing the Dynabook and Smalltalk (50m)
- Hammock Driven Development (40m) – An oldie but goodie
- Stunt Pilot restarts his engine in the nick of time (2m)
And lastly, a reminder from XKCD that our oceans are incredibly deep:
Have a great weekend.
