Apparently I haven’t done one of these since January. The title is sort of a lie, since I don’t have all these around in tabs; some are sitting in bookmark folders and so on.
Going back through almost a year means that I’ve actually reconsidered each of these and decided that it has aged well enough to pass on.
We’re Language Users · And that’s as good a specifier of Homo sapiens as any. Language is hard; for example see Evolutionary analysis shows languages obey few ordering rules. They present this sort of as a refutation of Chomsky, but that’s silly; his important points are about the relationship between language and the mind, and are independent of language’s structure.
Chicago · As photographed by Stanley Kubrick in his youth. What an eye.
The Economist Blogs · My tab backlog tends to fill up with them. Most intelligent centrists these days seem to spend an increasing amount of time bashing conservatism known-nothingism as deployed in the service of the 1%. These two made a particular impression: Stiglitz and the progressive Ouroboros, The 1% solution,
More On That One Percent · An Investment Manager's View offers a detailed survey inside that “top 1%”; it’s not homogeneous at all.
Booze · The relationship between humans and alcohol is complicated. The more data you look at, the more complicated it gets: An evaluation of the impact of a large reduction in alcohol prices on alcohol-related and all-cause mortality: time series analysis of a population-based natural experiment.
Canadian Pie · As in, demographic pie charts, from the charming Complètement À L'Ouest blog. The text is in French but the numbers aren’t.
Piracy Truth · Michael Geist is always excellent. If you really care about this subject you probably want to go and read the monster 430-page report on Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, but Geist, in The Truth About Pirates and Profits: A Market Failure, Not Legal One, has the goods in a few short clear paragraphs.
On Photography · Cameras don’t matter. Well, they do, but not the way you think. Mike Johnson, in More on Canon vs. Nikon, explains the relationship between a photographer and his or her tools.
I follow Shorpy, a blog consisting entirely of old photographs. The Sitting Room: 1905 is a good example of why.
He’s On a Boat · A truly remarkable tale of Geeks at Sea from my friend and Google Developer Relations colleague Reto Meier: When Offshoring Your Development Team Means Buying a Boat.
Going Out in Style · Was surprised, going through the stashed tabs, to find a YouTube music video; then I remembered coming across this. Check out The Dropkick Murphys, accompanied on this one by Bobby Orr.
Paul Ford · No Tab Sweep would be complete without a link to him; this one is How to Say I Love You. Warning; you may find that some of these cut a little deeper than is entirely comfortable.
And another! Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?
Paul Krugman · Nobel-prize-winning Times columnist, and America’s most visible intellectually-respectable left-winger. What’s Left of the Left is a nicely-done profile.
What Cassandra Learned · This is from an excellent Japanese Finance blog, Cassandra Does Tokyo: 25 Things I Learned in the 25 Years After My First 21 Years. Grouped into Economics, Philosophy, and Politics, and almost all excellent.
Also from Cassandra, The Price is...ummm....errrr.... Wrong (Part 2); deep writing on the economics of health care.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect · As defined by Michael Crichton; the specific case in point is newspapers, but applies to any sort of reportage. Basically, a good reason to not believe what you read.
High End · As in Audio. One my favorite writers and photographers, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, in Accurate Sound, writes about one of my own passions at less length and with greater clarity than I ever have.
Thirteen · The title is 13; I have a twelve-year old, but I think even people who don’t would find this to be good writing.
Pushing Back on Saint Steve · Steve Jobs communicated with the world by delivering products and making new kinds of business deals, and he did those things very well. Perhaps the only exception is his famous Stanford commencement address, which went viral once shortly after delivered then again when he died. Will Wilkinson begs, respectfully, to differ with Steve in Did Steve Jobs give good advice?. I can see both sides of the argument, and glad that Will wrote down the less popular one.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Paul Hoffman (Oct 28 2011, at 17:09)
Hou always have links to the Economist, which reminds me of a trend I have seen: lots of phishing for "subscribe to the Economist". The text in those messages is significantly better than typical spam and a fair number of changes week-to-week. I suspect that someone bothered to spend a bit of time on these in return for higher-quality suckers.
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From: Bud Gibson (Oct 29 2011, at 20:43)
A lot of my students have been bringing up the Steve Jobs advice in various formats. I'm of two minds about it:
1. I think you have to have some dream to drive you. We essentially all thrive on mythos of some sort. The guy clearly achieved a lot.
2. If everyone acted like him, either his myth or real life behavior, the world would be a disaster. I'm reading his authorized biography (more below), and his wife seemed to have a good sense of this.
The biography is a tough slog. Jobs was clearly a charming egomaniac, and it's grating to read on the e-ink page. Although I think Isaacson tried, the people he interviewed were still to much in Jobs' thrall to give objective renderings. Still, there may be something there, and I've decided to force myself through at least 3 chapters before giving up.
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