This is going to be a pretty fast and loose definition of blog, but I like sharing cool stuff. Some of these links will link to a particular post on that blog — this is if there’s a particular post I really like there, or what first led me to that blog.

“A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” by Historian Brett Devereux. https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ He’s especially good at military history, which is why I linked to his series on the Siege of Gondor from Lord of the Rings. I also enjoy his series on pop-culture misconceptions around Sparta

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ It’s a blog by the Statistician Andrew Gelman (and others who guest write). This is one of the more academic ones, so only likely to be fun if you’re a particular kind of nerd

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/12/part1statblocks/ Tabletop roleplaying games and law crossover blog

https://scatter.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/sex-as-a-social-construct/ Sociology blog. Quite academic, but still fun. Found it through Andrew Gelman’s blog above

https://www.bookandsword.com/2022/04/16/science-as-verified-trust/

https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/web_paleontology/ Unsure if this site is a blog, but certainly this post has many links to old-school web pages that are cool

https://gretzuni.com/ Dense philosophy stuff about technology. This person is an academic. N.b. I am a scientist, not a philosopher, so I am less good at vetting philosophy takes. I enjoy it though

https://explorationsofstyle.com/2011/02/09/reverse-outlines/ Blog by an academic who specialises in teaching writing to university students. I like her stuff.

https://www.bookandsword.com/2022/04/16/science-as-verified-trust/ I think this person is a historian too

https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-phony-comforts-of-useful-idiots Blog by economist Edward Ongweso Jr.

https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/ Blog about “the intersection of music and data”. Also has a podcast.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ This post went viral last year. Some people don’t like this tone of writing, but I found it quite cathartic, and have enjoyed other posts from the blog

https://datacolada.org/ “Thinking about evidence, and vice versa”. These guys do a lot of cool stuff on science methodology, like meta-analyses. They were so good at their job that they got sued. I really like them

https://karl-voit.at/ Blog about personal computing information systems. This guy was the one who first piqued my interest about Emacs a bunch of years ago (Emacs is a very old text editor with an insane amount of customisability and an even more insane learning curve)

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/essays/ “Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland”

https://meaningness.com/ It’s kind of blog that some would call pretentious as hell, but I like its vibe

https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler There’s not too many other posts on this blog, but I really enjoyed this one

https://theluddite.org/ “An anti-capitalist tech blog”

https://blog.thea.codes/winterblooms-tech-stack/ Cool resources on DIY music synthesisers

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway Maths! Especially category theory. The difficulty ranges from “pretty darn accessible” to stuff that’s way above my level. I like the pretty diagrams though.

Okay, that’s all that are coming to mind right now

I don’t know too much about this area, but I do know that this kind of task involves a bunch of complex processing in the brain. The more “Mechanical” aspects of vision could be described as visual acuity (sharpness of vision). However, gauging whether something is wonky would be a visual discrimination task, which involves more work by the brain. It’s an area in which one’s skill can be improved through learning, and some occupations have a lower discrimination threshold (I e. They can detect smaller differences).

That was wonderful, thank you for sharing. When it’s done well, I really enjoy this style of prose.

This sounds like a good interview approach. In the sense that the interview is also an opportunity for the interviewee to evaluate their prospective employer, this would be a green flag for me.

“I’m looking for a role where I can make good use of the skills I bring to the table” (because implicitly, the 299 places that didn’t email back don’t have a role where you can fit in and be useful (even if that’s only true in the sense that they didn’t hire you so therefore you can’t contribute there))

Apparently the average radius of the Earth at its equator is 6,378,000m. This means that in a day, someone sitting on a couch at the equator would travel (2 * \pi * 6378,000)m, which equals 40053840m. There are around 86,400 seconds in a day, so the equatorial couch sitter travels at 464m/s (rounded to 3s.f). That’s 1040mph.

I think the average walking speed is 3pmh. Amusingly, the mph figure I calculated above is 1037 if rounded to 4s.f. rather than 3, so the speed difference between the walker and a couch sitter is literally a rounding error.

The conclusion here is something that everyone here already knew before I wrote this comment: it’s hard to make any sense of individual human health progress if we try to think of it on a planetary scale.

I know someone whose daughter is a particularly passionate teenager who enjoys going to protests. My friend long ago acknowledged the limits of forbidding his daughter from going to these things, and instead tends to go with her to protests. This openness has also had the beneficial side effect of his daughter trusting him more when he says “No, this one is too dangerous. I don’t feel comfortable with you going, even with me”. Despite trying to stay away from anything too dicey, I know there have been instances where things have escalated quicker than expected and they’ve been caught in the fray.

These guys aren’t American, so it isn’t directly relevant here, but my point is that someone being there with their child isn’t too outlandish.

I share your view. I hold back my desire for schadenfreude by realising that the greatest punishment would be if they grew to understand the harms of their actions and views. Empathy can hurt like a bitch

That is a cello. It’s just that the microscopic cello shop has a poor selection so it had to opt for a too small cello

Yeah, this is where I’m at. I love it when people are weird as hell, even if it’s not inkeeping with my own aesthetic preferences

Rereading your comment in a heavily sarcastic tone, I can see what you were going for, but I am also unsurprised at it being misinterpreted. Sarcastic jokes are hard when there are people who say that kind of thing unironically

Although I recall that some of them don’t include links to explanations or info about the falsehoods; I like that this aviation one did do that.

Thank you for the learning! Before this thread, I didn’t know enough about altitude to care about this question, but now I’m like “neat! Cool learning!”.

In a general sense, rats have most definitely adapted around humans in similar ways. They’re smart little critters

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“Some DOGE staffers […] fear that [this shitstorm] could leave them vulnerable to political retribution and damage their future job prospects”

I wanted to make a sarcastic comment about how so many of them are super young, and so this must sting especially. However, I couldn’t figure out a way to say this in a sufficiently mocking tone. Fuck 'em