The Bookmarks Bin, September 2023

Shamelessly copying Scott Alexander's link compilation articles

I recently decided to clean out my browser bookmarks, and found a ton of really interesting links! I decided to shamelessly copy Astral Codex Ten and compile them into a list for you all.

Note: After publishing, I noticed some links don’t work well on a mobile device coming from email, but can be fixed by manually deleting the auto-appended fragments at the end of the URLs, e.g “%2F=&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email” in the first link.

Miscellaneous

• The Dead Internet Theory: Was the late 2010s internet already entirely peopled by bots? Probably not, but I feel as though this article anticipated ChatGPT in a lot of ways.

• Tradition is Smarter than You Are: Rationality may not be the key to humankind’s success. Instead, look at cultural memory and cultural evolution.

• Book Review: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: Scott Alexander’s book review of Julian Jaynes’ masterpiece.

• Planetary Scale Vibe Collapse: Related to the above topic, an ethnologist describes witnessing a transition from Jaynes’ “unconscious” tribal state of mind to a “conscious” individual state of mind. Fascinating reading, but take with a grain of salt.

• Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty: Datacolada provides (nearly) irrefutable evidence of fraud in a paper (about dishonesty!) by an esteemed psychologist.

• Investing for Geeks: Short and sweet investing advice.

• Photopea: Free online Photoshop!

• What to Say Instead of Trivially: Synonyms for “trivially” to use in math proofs that will irritate your readers. For example, “Galois died in order to show us that…”

• Make Your Own 30 kW Induction Furnace: Follow these instructions if you want to make a 30 kW induction furnace in your basement. Or don’t, you might die.

• Official Ordination Package of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

• Holier than Thou: Precision Holes by Drilling, Boring, and Reaming: A very useful and surprisingly interesting discussion of precision drilling.

Language and History

• Fully Justified Metroid Madness: A Twitter Thread from Matt Gemmell about the most impressive linguistic feat he’s ever seen.

• The Latin Library: a massive online compendium of Latin literature, compiled by William L. Carey.

• The Writing of a Skillful Scribe: Learn Hieratic via the story of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the oldest (complete) story in the world.

• Grisly Assyrian Record of Torture and Death: An article detailing the violence in Assyrian royal inscriptions, and an inspiration for my series on Assyrian kings replying to spam texts.

• Long live the King of Kings! Accession ritual in ancient Persia: The rites of kingship in the Achaemenid Empire.

• Having Had No Predecessor to Imitate, He Had No Successor Capable of Imitating Him: Who wrote the Iliad? A blog post reviewing the history of the Homeric Question, by Fantastic Anachronism, the entirety of which is worth reading, really.

• Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes: A comic strip that teaches you to read Korean.

Didactic Math/Physics Blogs

• A Bit Correlated: Tomas Polakovic’s blog that teaches you solid state physics via Julia (the programming language) or vice-versa.

• Trizen's Blog: Daniel Șuteu’s blog about mathematics and computer science, especially number theory. He’s also the only person I’ve ever seen post public answers to Project Euler (good for him, I learned a lot).

• Epsilon Squared: Ethan Epperly’s awesome applied mathematics blog.

Single-Concept Math/Physics Tutorials

• How To Solve It, by Polya -- A Summary: The essence of Polya’s famous book on mathematical problem solving in a single page.

• Feynman's Derivation of the Schrodinger Equation: A mathematical companion piece to Richard Feynman’s Nobel Lecture.

• The U.S. Particle Accelerator School: An online repository of courses and materials on every conceivable aspect of accelerator physics.

• Noises and Causes: The different types of power-law noise processes in physics, their origins and characteristics.

• Spectral Analysis of Noise: Related to the link above, a thorough tutorial on the analysis of noise in time-series data

• The Allan Variance Handbook: A handbook of definitions and tables relating to the Allan Variance, a method of analyzing noise and stability in time-series data

• Power Law Distributions in Empirical Data: Clauset et al. “present a principled statistical framework for discerning and quantifying power-law behavior in empirical data.” Looooots of people misuse power-law fits.

• Legendre Transforms for Dummies: If you ever wondered why there were so many Legendre transforms in thermodynamics or classical mechanics, here you go.

• The Triangle of Power: 3blue1brown explains a novel notation for exponentials, logarithms, and square roots that highlights their inherent symmetry.

• Powerlog: The Missing Operation: Epic Math Time describes the property of the “missing” operation in the sequence addition → multiplication → _______ → exponentiation.