1295. Good Mourning
↪ I, of course, remember the days after Queen Elizabeth II died, especially walking along the Thames next to the queue to see the queen one last time. This is a page with a lot of examples of how British webpages paid their respect to the queen.
1296. The Connected City of Ideas
↪ A great article on the metaphor of ‘marketplace of ideas’, the limitations of such a metaphor and, as the title suggests, an alternative metaphor.
1297. Forget Gladwell
↪ I have read most of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, and at this point I read anything by him with a sceptical attitude. This piece articulates how the issue with Gladwell’s approach to popular social science writing is not only his indifference to truth (loosely held ideas™), but also a “distortion on the production of knowledge in society.”
1298. Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend.
↪ As I have been refactoring a lot of code over the past few months, I resonate a lot with the idea that good code is code that is easy to delete. These are words to internalise and live by: “To write code that’s easy to delete: repeat yourself to avoid creating dependencies, but don’t repeat yourself to manage them. Layer your code too: build simple-to-use APIs out of simpler-to-implement but clumsy-to-use parts. Split your code: isolate the hard-to-write and the likely-to-change parts from the rest of the code, and each other. Don’t hard code every choice, and maybe allow changing a few at runtime. Don’t try to do all of these things at the same time, and maybe don’t write so much code in the first place.”
1299. Grim Fandango
↪ A deep dive into the point-and-click adventure game Grim Fandango. I played the remastered version back in 2017, and this article helped me understand my mixed feelings towards the game (an almost cinematic visual aesthetic but very outdated gameplay structure and mechanics).
1300. Beating every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time
↪ This is such an interesting video on how to beat every possible game of Pokemon Platinum. That is, to develop a sequence of events that will always beat the game independent of which of the 4,294,967,296 seeds is being picked. It starts out simple but quickly becomes complicated when different strategies are required to realign games with different scenarios. It is also full of interesting examples that can speak to your statistical intutition (or lack thereof) with probabilities, normal distributions, random events, etc. Conceptually, this sort of playthrough is the opposite of speedrunning. Not because it takes a lot longer, but because it is about completing a game with all possible outcomes. In a speedrun, you aim to find the easiest pattern – i.e., unique sequence of events – that will minimise the journey through a game. Here, we are interested in the robust pattern that will be the slowest but most robust way of completing a game.
1301. Leaving and Waving
↪ The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the best time to take a picture of your parents was 20 years ago. I have a soft spot for artistic work that – in any shape and form – capture the passing of time and life with simple means. This is a perfect example of such work.
1302. Visualizing the Past (World War II)
↪ A blog post looking at historical maps in the context of the Second World War, including of course several “propaganda maps”. The maps show how no map is neutral, whether it is about where to put the borders or to show air routes. See also Visualizing the Past (Part One), Visualizing the Past (Part Two), Visualizing the Past (Part Three), and Visualizing The Great War.
1303. An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton
↪ If you like the musical Hamilton (as you should) and like a good dataviz (as you should), you will enjoy this analysis of every line in the musical (even if you checked it out back in 2017). I found a link to this analysis in a recent dataviz, Is the love song dying?, which is also worth a look. In general, there is so much good (old) content there that is still worth checking out, e.g., a simple illustration of The Birthday Paradox.
1304. 39 Lessons on Building ML Systems, Scaling, Execution, and More
↪ A list of sensible points related to machine learning systems (both in terms of training and scaling) and some general observations on attending conferences.
1305. The Heist that Made the Mona Lisa Famous
↪ A summary of what happened when Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911. It took more than a day to notice that the painting was stolen, and Pablo Picasso was questioned in connection to the case.
1306. 20 things you didn’t know about Google Scholar
↪ It is difficult to imagine a world without Google Scholar, especially if you are doing academic research. I do not care a lot about new AI features in Google Scholar, but maybe that is useful for academics nowadays. In any case, here is a post with 20 facts, most of them – but not all – related to Google Scholar.
1307. 63 Chinese Cuisines: the Complete Guide
↪ How many cuisines are there in China? I know China is home to more than a single cuisine, but I would not have guessed 63. This is a really detailed introduction to the cuisines of China. A great piece of food writing, with a lot of maps and photos. And even a 40 minutes YouTube video if that is more to your liking.
1308. Dying Is a Form of Education
↪ This essay on Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is a great primer on Soulsborne games, and it made me understand why it is appealing to a lot of people (and why it is not something for me). Also, everything Gabriel Winslow-Yost writes related to video games is worth reading.
1309. How Blackjack Works
↪ If you are looking to get into blackjack (i.e., understanding the game — not necessarily playing it), this is a great resource on basic strategies, card counting, variance/volatility, etc. The website looks like it is from the web 1.0 era, primarily because it is from the web 1.0 era (and that is nothing but a good thing).
1310. 52 things I learned in 2024
↪ The annual piece by Tom Whitwell with things he learned in 2024. I have linked to his previous annual posts in assorted links, covering the years of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, and I am confident that I will share his annual post next year again, per tradition. Some of these facts are interesting but not surprising. For example, the fact that there “are just 16 trademarked scents in the US” seems more interesting by the fact that the number is as high as 16 (for example, perfume scents are not trademarked). The two most interesting facts in this year’s edition are “In 1800, 1 in 3 people on earth were Chinese. Today, it’s less than 1 in 5.” and “In 2024, around 10% of Anguilla’s GDP will come from fees for its .ai domain name.” Related to this, do also check out 52 Snippets from 2024.
1311. “Eat What You Kill”
↪ A ProPublica longread on a doctor killing his patients, and what feels even worse – turning them into cancer patients with no evidence of a cancer diagnosis. One of those stories that yet again shows much work high-quality reporting requires.
1312. TimeMap.org — World History Atlas
↪ A world history atlas with a temporal dimension. That is, you can explore how borders and countries have developed over the centuries. Furthermore, you can check out the rulers at the time, famous people living at that time, and specific battles taking place in the period of interest.
1313. Once More, With Feeling: Measuring Emotion of Acting Performances in Contemporary American Film
↪ This is a great example on how to present the key findings from your paper in an efficient and engaging manner. Of course, the topic of interest with a data-driven analysis of movies makes it easier to present examples with video, image and text, but I would – in general – like to see more academics try out different ways to communicate research findings.
1314. Racing’s Deadliest Day
↪ If you are not familiar with the 1955 Le Mans disaster (which I was not), this is a great piece looking into the disaster and the wider context of the disaster (including the post-Second World War anti-German sentiment in France). It is also difficult to imagine today that there was a time where the ‘Le Mans Start’ was an actual thing. And if you do not care about reading (in that case, what are you even doing here?), this is a good 20-minute video covering the accident (and the history of Mercedes in Le Mans more generally).
1315. The Wall Analysis – A Song-By-Song Literary Analysis of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”
↪ I am a sucker for concept albums. As more music is consumed as singles on playlists, particularly because of the UX on Spotify and similar streaming services, it can be difficult to find great new concept albums. Luckily, The Wall by Pink Floyd from 1979 is an amazing concept album, and here is a webpage that offers a breakdown of every song on the album.
1316. Moon
↪ I have shared several pieces by Bartosz Ciechanowski over the years, and this one on the moon is as good as ever. In other words, if you like his work in general, this one should be no exception.
1317. The definitive list of the most popular and/or respected variants
↪ This is a great conversation on chess variants to consider for lichess (as an issue on GitHub). I have been interested in different chess variants, and I had some fun going through the book The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants. It is amazing how many different variants of chess people have explored, such as two or more moves at a time (e.g., one more move each time), games with concealed information, unorthodox ways of capturing (e.g., squares with known or hidden dangers), introduction of captured pieces during play, unorthodox pawn properties (e.g., move diagonally and capture straight), moving the opponent’s pieces (e.g., making a move for each side), transporting and teleporting (e.g., gravitional and magnetic effects), different objectives of play (e.g., wiping out the opponent’s pieces), multiple boards, simultaneous movement, combination of pieces, pieces with limited and unlimited range, changed or multiple kings (e.g., substitute kings, concealed kings, and anti-kings), other boards (e.g., one-dimensional boards, hexagon boards, and boards based on triangles), and games using dice and cards.
1318. Combining 143 World War II movies into one series
↪ A supercut of different movies to show a timeline of the Second World War. The post here provide links to the episodes as well as insights into the method and tools being used to create the supercuts, such as Blender and Python. What I find interesting is the juxtaposition of events directly related to the Second World War and other significant events, especially in the period up to the war (the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, World War I, the first flight, the sinking of Titanic, the Amritsar massacre, the Russian Revolution, Roosevelt’s polio diagnosis, etc.).
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