Interweb Roundup

Things that are cool (old + new) — 6/11/2014

Bad Ad-hoc Hypotheses: Zach Weinersmith behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has created a speaker event which celebrates “well-argued and thoroughly researched but clearly wrong evolutionary theory”. The Competitive Advantage of Infant Vocalisation (i.e. why babies cry), Why Everything Tastes Like Chicken, Evolution and Adaptive Significance of Low Intelligence Fish (i.e why do goldfish have such a bad memory), are examples of some of the tongue-in-cheek presentation topics.

Product Hunt: Product Hunt surfaces the best new products daily, submitted and voted by users.

Farnam Street Blog: Shane Parrish wants people to go to bed each night smarter than when they woke up, live a meaningful life and become a better person by “mastering the best of what other people have already figured out”.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: This blog teaches you “how to be awesome at life” using science and research, written in a very efficient and summarised format. Been following this one for years, it’s served some interesting info, however has become a bit more commercial/click-bait like recently.

What If?: Randall Munroe of xkcd provides “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions”. Basically, you can find a rational explanation for any preposterous (user-submitted) situation imaginable.

Checkmate: A brief PIL Python visualization shows how chess pieces survive over the course of a game, drawing from 2.2 million chess simulations. Using this dataset from millionbase, and inspired by this Quora post.

InfoAus: Rosie Williams has created an easy to use site which makes open Australia data published by the government more transparent. eXpenseAus (expense claim data), BudgetAus (Federal Budget in a searchable database) and KnowYourPlace (ABS data on Socio-economic indicators) are some of the awesome tools worth exploring.

The Music Splitter: 40 popular songs split up into instrument and voice components, where each can be activated separately. Yes, it’s probably faster to source some sheet music but be patient with the loading (green bar, top right), it’s a bit fun.

ESSA: Our blog on all things economics from students at the University of Melbourne and Monash University (+ occasional guest writers). Check out Thinking Fast and Slow: Can You Do It? #shamelessplug