Web Roundup: More Links For April
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.
A (fortunately?) hypothetical human-chimp hybrid is called a humanzee.
Introduction to reactive programming. Exciting stuff.
Is there anything beyond quantum computing? (Answer: Not as far as we know.)
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.”
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.
