Links 20/x

Snail drinking a dew drop from an acorn head. And a comparison of bee sizes.

NYT Opinion from an Australian — Dear America, Why Did You Let Us Down? And what the hell, Australia?


Links 19/x

Magic Leap may not be so revolutionary after all.

Vox on gerrymandering. And Vox on using state’s rights defensively against Trump.

What Eli Dourado will be working on (aviation policy and regulation). And a scathing article on the FAA and modernization.


Links 18/x

Good Judgement Project update — I have now submitted my initial predictions for the 9 available questions in The World In 2017 challenge. You should all get started now, especially while there is still a huge error in the current forecast of whether Leung Chun-ying will win re-election as Chief Executive of…


Links 17/x

Good Judgement challenge — make predictions about the world in 2017. I feel like it would be fun to try, and if anyone is interested we could have an informal competition of our own.

Why is turkey cheaper when demand is higher?


Links 16/x

SlateStarCodex challenges whether Trump is racist. Ross Douthat responds on Twitter.

An anti-aging startup gets $116 million in funding from Jeff Bezos. And the blood of human teens rejuvenates old mice.


Emergency Links Post

SlateStarCodex has a great pre-election perspective, looks even better after we know the result.

Nate Silver — what a different two percentage points makes.

“National polls will eventually miss the popular vote by about 2 percentage points, which is…


Links 15/x

Long, interesting profile of Robin Hanson. His book is Age of Em (which is great), he blogs at Overcoming Bias, an interesting blog post of his is This is The Dreamtime.

Best chase scene ever, via Planet Earth 2.


Links 14/x

Extract of a lecture given by Waleed Aly (the Andrew Olle Media Lecture) on the changing nature of media and news — long and interesting.

“Technology is never value-neutral. It might allow us to do things we already do more easily. It may offer us new ways of delivering the same service…


Links 13/x

Long interview with Julia Galef, who hosts one of my favourite podcasts, Rationally Speaking.

Farm in South Australia grows tomatoes in the desert with nothing but sun and seawater.

A study about violence in mammals. Too many of the articles behind that link bury…


Links 12/x

Which words are the most metal? That is metal the musical genre. The article also has this sentence:

“As you can see, Five Finger Death Punch have the highest number of swear words in their lyrics, and Pig Destroyer have the most complex wordplay.”