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- A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope – Were R2-D2 and Chewie really running the Rebel Alliance?
- Hunting down my son’s killer – 3 years tracking a genetic disorder.
- Post-apocalyptic bureaucracies – The challenges of handling a Zombie epidemic in today’s society. The post is a satire on the handling of the Christchurch earthquakes.
- Taxi dance hall – Fascinating history of “pay per dance” venues
- Let’s Not Call It “Computer Science” If We Really Mean “Computer Programming” – Is Computer Science teaching the wrong thing instead of the stuff that people will actually need.
- Popular Craigslist Spam Tactics for Profit (and for Evil) – Examples of scams common on Craigslist (and sometimes elsewhere) with who is behind them
- Not by Bread-and-Marg Alone – How the food of the poor has evolved or devolved over the last 150 years.
- Finding Space (video) – An episode from the Canadian show “The National” on the evolution of housing. Focus on tiny apartments and laneway houses on existing properties. The main guy (starting 1 minute in) in the 1st story has such a cute accent.
- Why I wear the same thing every day, and what I wear. – There article doesn’t actually have a photo of the author in her outfits but here is one.
- Fred Dibnah laddering a chimney (part 1) – Video of Steeplejack Fred Dibnah showing how he climbs a [industrial] chimney.
- Do the math: Space-Based Solar Power – The extra output of space-based solar power doesn’t appear to outweigh the extra costs.
- Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil – probably for Lord of the Rings fans only.
- The Classic Slum – an extended review and summary of the book of the same name by Robert Roberts. It is about the English slum that Roberts grew up in the early 1900s.
- IPOing in NZ – notes from the NZX and Xero presentation – Summary by Lance Wiggs of a presentation by Xero CEO Rod Drury. The slides are also linked.
- Ungridlocked – What happened when New York closed traffic in Time and Herald Squares.
- Columbia’s Last Flight – The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare (2003)
- Building a Website to 200 Million pageviews and beyond. – ( slides and video ) Very interesting talk about youporn.com migrating to a new architecture. The main link is too a summary on highscalability.com
- Why Jonny can’t ride – Why biking to school is banned at many US schools.
- Meet the New Boss, Worse than the old boss – Musician David Lowery compares economics of music now and in the past
- A ticking time-bomb – How the lack of time-synchronisation of medical devices can kill
- Interviews With People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs: Ken Doyle, Safecracker
- Fungible A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead
- Dear New York Times & Wall Street Journal: How About Some Sensible Digital Subscription Pricing?
- Can London Afford the $14.5 Billion Price Tag of the Summer 2012 Olympic Games? I think Vanity Fair gets a bad rap, it has good articles and lots of pictures of pretty people
- I the multi-volume biography dead I’ll admit I have attempted the 8-part Winston Churchill biography but ran out of stream with a couple of parts to go.
- Welcome to Life « Tom Scott A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.
- What My 11 Year Old’s Stanford Course Taught Me About Online Education
- Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money If nothing else I need to pay less when I get some new glasses.
- A Tale of Two Terminals comparison between the launches of Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital Airport and Heathrow Terminal 5 from the perspective of someone used to handling complex software implementations
- The frequent fliers who flew too much This reminds me a lot of Internet (especially ISP) based unlimited accounts that fail to take account of people’s usage patterns when additional usage is free
- When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed Has the death toll from the drug Vioxx been greatly underestimated?
- A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi – Overview on how early search engine Inktomi was knocked out by Google. The Hacker News discussion is quite good and includes a link to a video talk by Inktomi’s co-founder.
- Reddit interview – IAmA Part Time Hooker in New Zealand – Raw Interview or Summary of Q/A . Prostitution is legal in New Zealand so some people in other countries find it interesting how it works. NSFW obviously.
- Are Shakespeare’s Plays Encoded within Pi? – YouTube . The full text is in the text section of the page.
- Gather – Auckland BarCamp has decided to rebrand itself as “Gather”. Not sure of the point especially since they don’t even own gather.co.nz (or gathernz.com or something). Anyway it’s a pretty good unconference that happens each year. This year it is one June 30th
