The Bookmarks Bin, August 2024
The second collection of interesting links I've come across
This will be the second in the Bookmarks Bin series, where I share some interesting links I’ve collected over the past year(s). Remember that these are links that I found interesting, and I don’t necessarily agree with their conclusions.
You can read the previous post in the Bookmarks Bin series below:
I’ve tried to categorize the links, but may not have done a very good job. Enjoy!
Math
Trajectoids are 3D shapes that roll along a desired path. Imagine taking a pencil and paper and drawing a random continuous path on the paper. Is there such a shape that, if placed on the start of that path, will trace out that path as it rolls? Yes. The Nature paper and a Youtube video demonstration:
Tiling the plane. It’s quite easy to cover a flat, 2D plane using only a single shape. A square, for example. But for many years, mathematicians have been searching for a single shape that can aperiodically tile the plane. Well, they found one. Two, actually, within three months of each other. The Einstein Shape can aperiodically tile a plane (if you’re allowed to reflect it) and the specter can do it without reflection.
Gian-Carlo Rota discusses the failures of modern differential equations education.
37 is the median value for the second prime factor of any integer. What?
Conditioning on a Collider. Say it with me, correlation is not causation! Spurious correlations show up all the time between unrelated variables, and one of the ways is through a “collider variable,” a variable that is causally influenced by two (or more) other variables in a causal diagram.
There is Only One Hypothesis Test, and its sister article, Hypothesis Testing is Only Mostly Useless. The author argues there is fundamentally only one statistical test, with a common framework. This gave me a great mental model to use (and some cautionary tales) whenever I have p-values to calculate or look at.
Science and Engineering
The 1859 Carrington Event disrupted global telegraph systems, but newly discovered "Miyake events" are far more powerful solar phenomena. These events, detectable in tree rings, offer precise historical dating tools while posing a potentially catastrophic threat to modern technology and infrastructure.
What’s inside a 1 dollar radar sensor? A teardown of a radar chip by a very knowledgable electrical engineer.
Smoking reduces all cause mortality? “Not highlighted in the CDC study and unlikely to be recommended, smoking caused the most significant reduction in mortality from all causes (HR 1.65) in both the mild and moderate to severe depression groups compared to the base model (HR 1.78). This was followed closely by physical activity (HR 1.67), which is much more likely to be encouraged.” Hmm. I suppose smoking → happiness → live longer is somewhat plausible…
In the same vein, eating ice cream also reduces all-cause mortality. Despite extensive analysis and attempts to “make it go away,” the association between ice cream consumption and lower heart disease risk in diabetics remained robust. Ice cream → happiness → live longer ? Maybe all medical studies are just BS.
History
The Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, England is the world's last gas-lit cinema. It’s also a deathtrap, and the renovators wrote an article about their quest to engineer it not to blow up.
A brutal academic takedown of a popular article on the most mundane of topics. Qing dynasty administrative documents. Was there an “administrative revolution?”
The Babylonians used floating point notation. Knuth explores some of their algorithms.
George Kennan’s Long Telegram, one of the (if not the) founding documents of the Cold War.
The Homeric question. Who wrote the Iliad and Odyssey?
Code and Tech
Horcrux encryption. Split your file into seven different encrypted pieces, that can only be reconstructed if you have a predefined subset of them.
Fatebook, a website meant to help you predict your output, and its parent site Quantified Intuitions, which has some fun prediction-market style calibration quizzes
Overview of hardware concepts that scientists should understand to write fast code, focusing on CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, and optimization techniques. It covers topics like cache usage, SIMD vectorization, branch prediction, and multithreading, using Julia to demonstrate how these hardware features impact code performance.
Targeted ads suck at their job. Why do companies want your data anyway?
The FCC issued orders to 20 phone companies demanding they show cause why they shouldn't be removed from the Robocall Mitigation Database for submitting deficient or nonsensical “robocall mitigation plans.” This article collects the most unhinged submissions. The FCC received blank pages, a Windows Printer Test, and an “indiscernible object.”
Bing can read captchas, but only if you hide them in pictures of lockets.
Test your prompt injection skills, by trying to fool an LLM into revealing the secret password with increasingly clever prompts.
Internet Artifacts: A virtual museum containing images of important internet milestones, like a topological map of ARPANET and the first spam email.
Two Hackers, One Keyboard. Has anyone had the desire to imitate this (in)famous NCIS scene? Now you can.
Society
We have used too many levels of abstraction and now the future looks bleak. “A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure tools, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.” As always, treat predictions of doom with healthy skepticism, but I do worry about this sometimes.
The exam that broke society, the long shadow of the Keju, the Chinese imperial civil service exam.
How Jon Stewart made Tucker Carlson. Stewart's well-intentioned efforts to reform journalism, in true monkey’s paw fashion, ended up accelerating trends that created our modern fragmented media landscape that he now rails against.
Book Review: Going Infinite. Zvi Mowshowitz reviews Michael Lewis’ book on the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.
The evolution of Evony ads. Anyone else remember these ads?
It doesn’t even have the game title. Things you’re allowed to do, a list of unconventional advice about things you’re allowed to do that you thought you weren’t, or didn’t even know you could.
How Effective Altruism lost its way. Eh, I still like them.
The trouble with the view from above. States seek to make society "legible" by standardizing complex local practices. Local systems are very different and encode valuable local knowledge but are illegible to outsiders. For example, how’d you get your last name?
The Awful German Language. A satirical essay by Mark Twain about the very unusual features of German.
The Psmiths’ Bookshelf, the best collection of book reviews on the internet!
Monopolies are good, actually (in tech, anyway). This was really a great essay.
