Category: Links

Links: Zombies & paperwork, R2-D2, Taxi Dancers, Genetics

  1. A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope – Were R2-D2 and Chewie really running the Rebel Alliance?
  2. Hunting down my son’s killer – 3 years tracking a genetic disorder.
  3. 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.
  4. Taxi dance hall – Fascinating history of “pay per dance” venues
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Links: CS, Criaglist Spam, Bread-and-Marge, housing

  1. 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.
  2. Popular Craigslist Spam Tactics for Profit (and for Evil) – Examples of scams common on Craigslist (and sometimes elsewhere) with who is behind them
  3. Not by Bread-and-Marg Alone – How the food of the poor has evolved or devolved over the last 150 years.
  4. 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.
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Links: Chimneys, Fashion, Space Power and Tom Bombadil

  1. 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.
  2. Fred Dibnah laddering a chimney (part 1) – Video of Steeplejack Fred Dibnah showing how he climbs a [industrial] chimney.
  3. Do the math: Space-Based Solar Power – The extra output of space-based solar power doesn’t appear to outweigh the extra costs.
  4. Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil – probably for Lord of the Rings fans only.
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Links: Slums, NZ IPOs, Columbia, NY Traffic

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Ungridlocked – What happened when New York closed traffic in Time and Herald Squares.
  4. Columbia’s Last Flight – The inside story of the investigation—and the catastrophe it laid bare (2003)
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Links: Youporn, Cycling, Music and time

  1. 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
  2. Why Jonny can’t ride – Why biking to school is banned at many US schools.
  3. Meet the New Boss, Worse than the old boss – Musician David Lowery compares economics of music now and in the past
  4. A ticking time-bomb – How the lack of time-synchronisation of medical devices can kill
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Links: Scaling Pinterest, NYT and SF charts, Flickr

  1. How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – Could yahoo have grown the flickr community from 2005 and beaten out facebook.
  2. A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time
  3. Amanda Cox and countrymen chart the Facebook I.P.O – Serious cool behind the scenes on the charts in the New York Times
  4. Pinterest Architecture Update – 18 Million Visitors, 10x Growth,12 Employees, 410 TB of Data
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Links: safecrackers, media, olympics, biography, singularity

  1. Interviews With People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs: Ken Doyle, Safecracker
  2. Fungible A treatise on fungibility, or, a framework for understanding the mess the news industry is in and the opportunities that lie ahead
  3. Dear New York Times & Wall Street Journal: How About Some Sensible Digital Subscription Pricing?
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. Welcome to Life « Tom Scott A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.
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Links: China vs UK, glasses, unlimited flying & Online Ed.

  1. What My 11 Year Old’s Stanford Course Taught Me About Online Education
  2. Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money If nothing else I need to pay less when I get some new glasses.
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed Has the death toll from the drug Vioxx been greatly underestimated?
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Interesting links for May 5th 2012

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Are Shakespeare’s Plays Encoded within Pi? – YouTube . The full text is in the text section of the page.
  4. 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
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