Andrew Drucker has a paper where he mentally multiplies ten-digit numbers by exploiting human image recognition.

Does money matter in politics? A much needed critical examination of a popular narrative.

Cousin marriage is a common practice in the Middle East. Steve Sailer details how this may explain some of the difficulty of forcing Democracy on these nations.

A flying snake. It’s called a Chrysopelea.

Recent welfare reform has siphoned money from the very poor to the almost-poor.

Divorce is contagious: We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network.

New hobby: searching twitter for the phrase “white people.”

“In early eighteenth-century Stockholm, women not only accounted for more than 60 percent of property crime offenders but also 45 percent of murder and manslaughter offenders and 41 percent of assault offenders (Andersson 1995).”

A (fortunately?) hypothetical human-chimp hybrid is called a humanzee.

“anyone who has ever gotten a cat into a bag knows that once out, it will not go back, suggesting the irreversibility of a told secret”

Introduction to reactive programming. Exciting stuff.

“Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we find no evidence that business degrees improve employment prospects. Furthermore, we find no evidence linking particular degrees to interview-request rates.”

Is there anything beyond quantum computing? (Answer: Not as far as we know.)

The mathematics autodidact’s aid.

“perhaps the most creative form of animal masturbation is that of the male bottlenose dolphin, which has been observed to wrap a live, wriggling eel around its penis.”

Why are humans such prudes? “Given that studies show that women and men enjoy it (sex) more than most other activities (on average, not on the margin I’ll grant), and given its intrinsically low cost, it appears that even a crude approximation of a utility maximizing person would probably spend much more time having sex than most do.”

Children with Williams syndrome display no racial bias. “True to form, the control group preferred their own race and gender. The children with Williams syndrome, however, had no racial preference—although they still discriminated by gender.”

Entrepreneurs capture about 7% of the value that they create: “We conclude that only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.” (HT: Ben Kuhn.)

Genome sequence is improving faster than Moore’s law. (HT: Scott Alexander)

“Since August 20, 2007, several detached human feet have been discovered on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia (Canada) and Washington (United States)… The series of discoveries has been called ‘astounding’ and ‘almost beyond explanation’, as no other body parts have turned up.”

The 3 largest existing statues each depict Buddha.

There are 700,000 people in the United States who identify as transgender, .2% of the population.

Divorce rate among birds depends on the number of available females: “mate change by pair members and/or breaking of pair bonds by unmated individuals is more frequent when females outnumber males.”

Kerbal Space Program is a game where the players create and manage their own space program. xkcd calls it the best way to learn orbital mechanics.

On the cruelty of really teaching computing science: “needless to say, refusal to exploit this power of down-to-earth mathematics amounts to intellectual and technological suicide.”

“If you learned formal methods for software, how useful have you found it?” (Answer: worthless.)

What source code is worth studying? One insightful commenter points to this gem from Peter Siebel: “Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists.” (Algorithms seem like a good candidate for interesting specimen.)

Wikipedia has a beta “hovercard” feature, where one can hover over a link to view a portion of the article. Here’s why you might want such thing.

Sea otters are sometimes observed raping baby seals to death.

All of Edsger W. Dijkstra’s manuscripts (his “EWDs”) are online.

A sociology-style deconstruction of the pick-up community.

Nearly twice as many black men than black women are looking for a long-term relationship, or so they report.

Moravec’s paradox: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

Gay men are three times more likely to suffer from an eating disorder than straight men and are disproportionately interested in plastic surgery.

“Computers are far better than humans at recognizing the difference between real and fake pain in the faces of test subjects.”

“I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.”

Advice on how to do research from Manuel Blum. “Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it.” Insightful throughout.

Are there any imperative algorithms that can’t be translated efficiently into functional ones? (Answer: no.)

Reproducibility of research does not correlate with journal impact factors.

To catch a criminal, law enforcement sometimes elicit “reverse-order alibis,” e.g. telling the events in the reverse order that they happened. (HT: Kaj Sotala)

“Surprise is a strong attractor of human attention, with 72% of all gaze shifts directed towards locations more surprising than the average, a figure rising to 84% when focusing the analysis onto regions simultaneously selected by all observers.”

Vladimir Voevodsky has a set of (non-technical) slides up on the importance of the univalent foundations program — rethinking the foundations of mathematics — and its relationship with computer assisted proof.

Neat study from PLoS one: a man’s IQ is reflected in his face and can be “read” by observers, while a woman’s IQ cannot. Or, to put it another way, if you think you know how smart some woman is after looking at her, you’re wrong. They found no correlation between actual IQ and attractiveness, but there was a correlation between perceived IQ and attractiveness. (HT: hbd* chick)

Both men and women rated stronger males with larger, more variable and faster arm movements as better dancers.

In a Finnish sample, those with higher creatine levels went on to earn more — 1 standard deviation in levels being worth a 6.8% increase in earnings. (Creatine is commonly supplemented by athletes.) (HT: gwern for this and the next.)

A recent study examining Chinese censorship policy finds that the censors target any mention of collective action, not criticism of the state.

“There are probably three or four [unobserved planet-like objects] that are three times the size of Pluto, and the biggest of these objects … is probably the size of Mars or the size of the Earth.”

Reptiles can sneeze.

High-frequency trading: no big deal? “Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated, competing markets improve market liquidity, reduce trading costs, and make stock prices more efficient.”

“A foreign language feels less emotional than the mother tongue.”

Should we be worried about increased corporate control and complexity of Linux?

In 1554, Sir James Hales drowned himself. The court then convicted him of “self-murder” and his estate was forfeited to the crown.

To score drugs, try a support group for addicts.

Teenage pregnancy — not that big of a deal? “Our results reinforce recent research that finds at most modest adverse causal effects of teen births on the mothers’ adult outcomes.” Summary.

The Canadian FCC has reprimanded a Toronto-based TV channel for not broadcasting enough Canadian porn.

The genes of men who make good cyclists also make them good looking, concludes biologist Erik Postma. The effect size is stronger for women not on contraceptives, providing more evidence that birth control is doing funky things to human attraction. (HT: Tyler Cowen.)

A hurdle model for scientific productivity. In short, there are 8 factors that contribute to scientific productivity. If one is decent at all 8, one will be much more productive than other scientists, and weakness at any one is a sort of choke point. (HT: gwern.)

The structure of the hurdle model reminds me of the “Great Filter” solution to the Fermi Paradox. Intelligent life is rare because it has to travel through so many filters and there are few megaproductive scientists for the same-ish reasons.

During the first 15 years after publication, the median paper is cited 1 time. (Data here.) More than a third of all published papers go uncited.

The CDC has put together a zombie preparedness strategy.

“Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.”

Children instructed to gesture with their hands while learning mathematics gain a deeper and more flexible understanding of the material. Fields Medalist Terry Tao describes this sorta thing in a MathOverflow answer, “In one extreme case, I ended up rolling around on the floor with my eyes closed in order to understand the effect of a gauge transformation that was based on this type of interaction between different frequencies.”

Familiar with the studies that say cohabiting before marriage predicts divorce? Well, that’s maybe wrong. This newer study suggests that it’s the age at which people cohabit that matters, not living together in general.

A webcomic for nihilists. I like it. I think I’m going to go stare at the output of my random number generator for a while now.

Aaron Swartz details the viewquake he experienced after reading Chomsky’s Understanding Power. I’ve added it to my to-read list, even though progressives talk about Chomsky like some sort of religious prophet, while AI guys usually call him the worst word they know — postmodernist.

Candy Crush is NP-hard. As is Pac-man, Tron, Doom, Starcraft, Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon. (HT: Pip, Jeremy Kun.)

“Alcohol advertisements don’t just get consumers to switch from one brand to another. They also increase total drinking among youth aged 15-26.“

The brain is a lossy compressor: “I realize it is tempting to use lossy text compression as a test for AI because that is what the human brain does when we read text and recall it in paraphrased fashion. We remember the ideas and discard details about the expression of those ideas.”

“Marriages arranged through the mail-order services would appear to have a lower divorce rate than the nation as a whole, fully 80 percent of these marriages having lasted over the years for which reports are available.”

Insight from Wikipedia: There is a discrepancy between how international adoptions are regarded (“saving a child”) and how international marriages are regarded (“buying a wife”).

The overlap between “ethicist” and evil genius: “Turning to human engineering as a possible solution, Dr. Roache looks at the idea of life span enhancements so that a life sentence in prison could last hundreds of years. Another scenario being explored by the group is uploading the criminal’s mind to a digital realm to speed up the 1,000 year sentence.”

A “well-sorted” version of the King James Bible, where all the letters have been, well, sorted. “The Well-Sorted Version captured my imagination because it recreates the alienation I felt trying to reconcile the reputation and contents of the Bible.”

Ever wonder how data compression works? (You ought to if you’ve read my post on the relationship between compressibility, interestingness, and creativity.) Scott Vokes gave a presentation on the topic at Strange Loop and the talk is now online.

Golden rice is rice spliced with carrot genes. It has superior nutritional characteristics — more vitamin A, life-saving stuff. The product has been ready to go since 2002, but has been delayed by advocacy groups like Greenpeace. Now, two economists estimate that the delay has, over the past decade, cost 1.4 million life years in India, or about 2 billion US dollars.

Is bureaucracy killing Wikipedia? “The most successful candidates were those who edited the Wikipedia policy or project space; such an edit is worth ten article edits.”

The tale of a boy who didn’t realize he was unable to smell until the age of 14.

The Pirahã people — a tribe of Amazon natives — are able to whistle their language and, curiously, “The language does not have words for precise numbers, but rather concepts for a small amount and a larger amount.” They would make good physicists.

Why P doesn’t equal NP.

Why P might equal NP.

Mnemonics 101: An introduction to memory hacking.

“This paper finds that the share of opposite gender friends has a sizable negative effect on high school GPA.” Lest you jump to conclusions and blame sex-crazed teenage boys, the effect size is significantly larger for females.

Artists tend to have wealthier parents than doctors.

There is no consensus among economists on minimum wage.

“A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called ‘magic mushrooms,’ was enough to bring about a measurable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.”

What theoretical computer science videos should everyone watch?

I’ve written before about a mathematical problem, the secretary problem, that (naively) suggests people date too few people before marriage. In economics, the idea that people make rational choices regarding marriage is called the “efficient marriage market hypothesis.” Modern marriage markets are about 80% efficient.

“The more ethnically diverse an area is, the less likely people are to trust others
within that area.”

“About a quarter of the world’s population would like to permanently move to another country (Torres and Pelham 2008).”

Open borders could double world GDP — equivalent to 23 years of economic growth.

Are fat people friendlier? “Extraversion was positively associated with BMI in men.” (HT: hbd* chick for this and the next three.)

“Women furthermore appear to more frequently report attraction to men other than primary partners when they are fertile in their cycle than in the infertile luteal phase.”

“Ed Houben has an unusual pastime. He has slept with scores of women who seek him out for his legendary powers of insemination.”

Steven Pinker’s list of dangerous ideas.

Same sex couples are happier than heterosexual ones.

How long until whole brain emulation — mind uploading? Anders Sandberg has a paper out predicting a 50% chance of whole-brain emulation before 2059. (HT: Robin Hanson)

A review of linear algebra, with pictures instead of matrix computation — which, if the Lord God had possessed a bit more foresight, would have been banned in Leviticus instead of shrimp.

The mutation for six instead of five fingers is dominant. The good news: children of the future will type faster. The bad news: we will have to throw out all the old gloves. Discussion here.

Do people believe in free will in order to justify punishing immoral actions? Clark et al. think so. “[E]xposure to immoral behaviour increases beliefs in free will, and that this increase is mediated in part by motivation to punish immoral behaviour.”

Study finds jazz musicians are more creative than those in other genres. I was going to use this as an opportunity to trumpet the innate superiority of jazz musicians over classicists, but then I thought hey — maybe they’re more creative because they practice being creative. Lo and behold, unlike IQ, creativity can be improved with training and the gains are transferable. HT: hbd* chick.

Do Olympians have funny hands?

The whiter the college, the more diversity depicted in the brochures.

In the United Kingdom, attractive children score about 12 points higher on IQ tests than non-beautiful children. However, non-standard body types do correlate with some measures of cognitive function — feminine men and masculine women showing stronger spatial performance in one study.

File this under, “What the fuck, evolution?” Men and women both find the opposite sex more attractive when they wear the color red.

Publishers Springer and IEEE have been forced to take down more than 120 papers after discovering that they were fakes, generated by the program SCIgen. How’s that peer review working out again?

This page generates new postmodern works each time you refresh it, and you know what? Auto-generated postmodernism is still better than actual postmodernism.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in American English. It means “Buffalo bison that other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison.” Maybe this illustrates the limits of grammatical correctness?  My third-grade teacher told me, “You can start a sentence with ‘and’ when you’re a best-selling author.” And now I do it whenever I want.

Those who believe in hell are less satisfied and less happy with their lives than their hell-denying counterparts, even after controlling for religiosity. I dated a girl once whose parents thought that bad dreams were spiritual warfare. If I thought that dreaming I was a giant donut was literally the work of the devil, I’d be freaked out, too.

Depression risk decreases with increased caffeine consumption among women. You know what they say — “Happy wife, happy life.” Start dosing your spouse.

“When playing the dictator game, non-ovulating women shared 45% of their money with men, while ovulating women were willing to share 60% of their money with men.”

Education is politically polarizing: “Highly educated liberals become more liberal, while highly educated conservatives grow more conservative.”

Guy working at futon store gets kicked in the head and becomes a number theorist.

The chilling effects of copyright law on reuse: “a back-of-the envelope calculation suggests that a lower bound on the loss to social welfare from copyright is about $267,335 annually for Wikipedia.”

“It’s impossible to say how many, if any, couples relied solely on Mountain Dew for birth control.”

A psychology graduate student, three psychologists, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a painter and a housewife with no history of mental illness gain entrance into psychiatric hospitals around the country by pretending to hear voices. From that point on, they act normally. “Despite constantly and openly taking extensive notes on the behavior of the staff and other patients, none of the pseudopatients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients were able to identify them as impostors.”

A map of every state’s favorite band.

Which math books are so well written that even if you did not like the subject before, you could still read and enjoy the book?

An astronaut can survive unprotected in space for about half a minute before suffering permanent damage.

The Nigerian version of Sesame Street features an HIV positive muppet. I would like to know how one gets a muppet HIV positive.

The BBC has a podcast on the history of mathematics — episodes currently span Newton, Galois, Bourbaki, and ten others.

Universities, in an analog to patent trolls, are trademarking phrases like, “cure violence,” and “be the difference.”

Simon Peyton Jones has slides up on how to write a research paper. My thinking after reading it: The aim of all writing is to infect the reader with an idea as if it were Marburg haemorrhagic fever.

How predictable are the Oscars?

Prediction markets call 21 out of 24 Oscar winners.

What factors most correlate with salary?

“We find that embryo selection, on its own, may have significant (but likely not drastic) impacts over the next 50 years, though large effects could accumulate over multiple generations.”

So, erotic watches are a thing.

On Pokemon: “I always just assumed Kanto screened all the dumb kids outta its schools by the age of ten and invented the sport to trick them into getting lost in the woods.”

A couple of mathematicians at Penn blogging about AI.

Users with many Facebook friends are less likely to post about politics and gay rights. This sorta replicates what OkCupid discovered a few years back — “People who hold their beliefs lightly are much better liked, even by people who are themselves serious.” So, don’t take anything seriously, and when your girlfriend complains that “you’re never serious,” ask her if her best friend is still single and what is her number again? Discussion here.

Hoofed carnivores used to exist, sorta like man-eating horses — the stuff of nightmares. They may have evolved into whales.

In 2007, a mutation of the RIMS1 gene was discovered. It’s unique to a single a Scottish family. Those with the mutation have verbal IQs between 17 and 50+ points higher than kin without the mutation. The downside? The mutation blinds you after age 20. The real question: When is science going to engineer this into a pill so that I can trade my sight for +50 IQ?

Resting after activities with high memory load enhances activity in brain regions associated with memory consolidation. Or, less formally, taking breaks during studying is a good idea, says neuroscience. This dovetails nicely with gwern’s recommendation to do Anki reviews prior to sleep. (As an aside, gwern’s article on spaced repetition is one of my favorite things on the internet.)

Men who do more housework are less likely to get laid. Cue feminists with all kinds of “explanations”, which are — as you might expect — even less convincing than the paper itself. I especially like the argument, “If men aren’t getting sex then women aren’t getting sex, either.” Thank you. I will be sure to point that out to all the third-graders who haven’t yet figured out that men value sex more than women — what’s that you say? Some sort of sexual marketplace? Discussions here and here.

Speaking of a sexual marketplace, here’s what happens when you confront the worst sort of politically-mindkilled feminist with the sex-as-marketplace frame. It’s not pretty. This is a better critique. I know it’s better because I wrote it.

Preacher believes God will protect him from snake bites. Preacher handles poisonous snake. Snake bites preacher. Preacher refuses medical treatment. Preacher dies. The implications are left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: the implications are atheism.)

Science confirms — if you want to persuade someone, insulting them is a bad idea, but only idiots don’t already believe that.

Enjoyment of internet trolling correlates with measures of sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Given the amount of trolling I’ve engaged in, this has some not-so-nice implications for my character. (But hey, you’d figured that out already, right?) I’m calling it now: given that psychopaths are attractive, internet trolls — as they have long been telling us — have more success with women than matched controls (and most of that success is thanks to your mom.)

Treating healthy controls with an anti-depressant reduces the likelihood that they will make utilitarian-style judgments — SSRIs make people fail the trolley problem. (Let’s be honest. If you’re not sacrificing one life to save five, you’ve failed.) Unfortunately, my further research didn’t turn up any studies on the relationship between moral judgments and mood disorders. I wanted to know if depressives are more likely to make utilitarian judgments. One study suggests that having the “bad” 5-HTTLPR genotype, which is maybe associated with mood disorders, results in less utilitarian judgment. However, the study itself filtered all participants with a history of affective disorders, rendering it mostly worthless.

Those who don’t know calculus are doomed to rediscover it: Dr. Mary Tai invents an exciting new way to approximate the area under a curve using trapezoids and is cited over 200 times. She dubs this new rule, “Tai’s rule,” and for addition to my this-is-definitely-absolutely-not-a-proof list, “The validity of each model was verified… by plotting the curve on graph paper and counting the number of small units under the curve.” Discussion here.

A caribou is a reindeer and other inspiring tales of people updating their beliefs.

Winning the lottery makes people more right-wing. The larger the win, the further to the right people shift. The paper “explains” this as (paraphrased) “humans are rational actors and vote out of self interest.” Ah, the good ol’ nonsense-as-explanation approach. Bold move. Your vote is negligible, as are your political leanings. It’s noise. The self-interest thing is to use politics as an opportunity for signalling social desirability, e.g. “I vote because I’m so moral. We should be friends.” Discussion.

George Price discovered the game theoretic explanation of altruism (kin selection) thus showing us the path via which altruism evolved from selfish genes. The rest of his life is a story straight out of Lovecraft. Price, unable to deal with the ramifications, began an unending escalation of random acts of kindness in an attempt to prove his theory wrong, even dedicating his life to the homeless (who responded by stealing his belongings.) Finally, after being thrown out of his apartment, Price slit his own throat with nail scissors, killing himself.

The BBC has banned all-male panel comedy shows, in an attempt to help women compete with their male counterparts. This follows on the heels of social justice warriors’ complaints that Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is too male and too white. 7 years later, Christopher Hitchens’s essay on “Why Women Aren’t Funny” remains prescient.

During the Cold War, many American agents were caught because their phony passports used stainless steel staples. The staples in the Soviet passports would corrode with time, while the fake American ones would not. I imagine spies travelling back in time from the future would experience similar problems.

There is no chocolate in white chocolate.

A list of average GRE scores by intended graduate major. It’s interesting to note that philosophy graduate students tend to be strong across disciplines. Still, I would not read too much into this given the meager predictive value of GRE scores.

Jones et al. have a new paper out on the relationship between age and scientific genius. Spoilers: great scientific output peaks in middle age. The paper further finds that the average age of great scientific achievement has been increasing with time. This supports the hypothesis that scientific progress is becoming more difficult over time as the low-hanging fruit diminishes. For a hilarious essay on this phenomena in computer hardware architecture, check out “The Slow Winter.”

Scott has written a post on the creepiness of sleep disorders, which includes the story of a man who drove 10 miles and then murdered his mother-in-law while asleep. The two were on good terms.

Have you noticed how all the advertising for the winter olympics is weirdly mom-oriented?

Upvoting an individual post increases the final ratings of that post by 25% on average, says science. This has serious implications for sculpting online discussions, e.g. If I were running a political campaign, you can bet that I’d be paying someone to go around upvoting anything positive about my candidate. Other strategies include building voting rings with friends or creating a dummy account to upvote everything you write in order to increase your impact.

There is a nice paper here that argues that sex differences are often exaggerated in evolutionary psychology. It includes facts like: 2-4% of men regularly visit prostitutes and power increases infidelity among both men and women.

I have seen this cartoon drawing tutorial recommended by professional cartoonists more than once.

The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a project to dig as deep into the Earth’s crust as possible, just because. This is the perfect set-up for a horror novel. “In 1985, the Soviet Union began a project to dig deeper into the Earth’s crust than ever before. After 12 years and 7 miles, they unleashed something terrible…”

John Baez, as part of an interview with Luke Muelhauser and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute has written up his intellectual habits, which include learning as much as possible about everything, looking for gaps, compressing knowledge and climbing the ladder of abstraction, a list of questions for doing so, analogy charts, and keeping a list of open problems. It’s in the same class as works like Gian-Carlo Rota’s “Ten Lessons I wish had been Taught” and Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research,” which are also good reads.

American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

Harvard alum proposes ditching academic freedom in favor of what she calls “academic justice.” In plain English, “people should be able to say whatever they like, so long as me and the rest of my gang of thugs agree with it.” Observe the now fashionable rhetorical technique of those on the far-left to coat their ham-handed attempts at limiting free speech with a social-justicey, pseudo-moral veneer — “I want more women in my field and open borders not because women and immigrants overwhelmingly support my politics, but because I’m such a caring person.”

What’s the most bullshit-sounding-but-true fact you know? My personal favorite: “There used to be a flying reptile that was as tall as a giraffe.” It’s called the Quetzalcoatlus. 36 foot wingspan. May have weighed more than 400 pounds. Runner up: bombs containing bats.

If Earth were shaped like a donut, a day would be 2.84 hours long.

Terry Tao, whom I like to admire from afar, has posted what is maybe a takedown of Otelbaev’s claimed proof of Navier-Stokes, but the best part? “One could describe the dynamics here as being similar to the famous ‘lighting the beacons’ scene in the Lord of the Rings movies, except that (a) as each beacon gets ignited, the previous one is extinguished, as per the energy identity; (b) the time between beacon lightings decrease exponentially; and (c) there is no soundtrack.”

Reason #24237834 the human brain is a gigantic hack: Thinking about yourself in the third person reduces stress.

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl dumps boy. Boy is heartbroken. Tries everything. Nothing. Boy shapes up. Boy goes to law school. Years pass. Boy gets back together with girl. Boy gets engaged with girl. Boy breaks it off with girl. Why? No apparent reason. Boy kills between 30 and 36 women. That boy? Ted Bundy. In his words, “I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have married her.“

Speaking of murder, Brazilian woman attempts (and fails) to kill her husband by lacing her vagina with poison. For those wondering, “your vagina is fairly absorbent and shoving a bunch of poison in it will probably hurt you as much as it hurts the person you’re trying to kill.”

Scott Alexander wrote an interesting piece on the search terms that lead people to his blog, including 7th graders looking for answers to their homework on alien thickness. My favorite is “how to atract sisters,” which suggests the visual of throwing a salt lick out into the woods with the intention of attracting not deer, but more sisters.

If there are time travelers among us, how would we find them? Well, what about checking whether anyone has tweeted about a historical event before it happened? Physicists Nemiroff and Wilson tried it but, alas, no evidence of time travelers.

Malbolge is a programming language designed to make it impossible to write programs in. Andrew Cooke thought, “Challenge accepted!” and implemented a beam search algorithm to find a working hello world.

Advice to would-be language implementers (so me and dozens of others), “Every now and then I feel a temptation to design a programming language but then I just lie down until it goes away.”

What are the best shortest, to-the-point but comprehensive and elegant mathematical texts out there?

Leonard Adelman — he’s the A in RSA — has a guest post over on John Baez’s blog about the rarest things in the universe.

There is some interesting exposition here with explanations of Grothendieck‘s work. You always hear such crazy things about him. The exposition itself is  mostly a weird mix of anecdote in English and French (fucking Europeans) along with, well, I’m not sure, but it looks like abstract algebra.

Kriegspiel is chess where you can’t see the opponents pieces.