Links, November 2022
Finished the first draft of my book, Building With Ethereum: Products, Protocols, and Platforms, which is now available to pre-order from Amazon. Some minor edits to do and then to production. Other than that, I’ve been enjoying drinking again – more on that soon – and reading, relaxing, resting. I’m taking the rest of the year off to plan and scheme.
Heavy fiction month. The Rest is History prompted me to start reading some Agatha Cristie, so I sat down over the weekend and read And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Sleeping Murder. The writing is charming and lovely, and funny, even when grim. You truly get the sense that she’s building these tropes as she goes along, that the structure of the whodunnit genre was falling out of her pen as she went. Totally gripping. I’ve not enjoyed fiction this effortlessly since Station Eleven.
I also read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, a good novel but about 200 pages longer than it needed to be. I find the same problem with most scifi and fantasy. Something about world-building lends itself to self-indulgence? I don’t know.
Reread David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter in preperation for my Joni Mitchell Interintellect salon, which went well. I put that book down liking her much less as a person and much more as an artist.
Upload a paper, highlight confusing text, get an explanation.
An interesting approach to price iteration and programmable pricing structures: theory and practice.
Some good housing stuff this month too. Much more energy toward this issue in my little corner of the internet. Auckland upzoning reforms working well, causing a meaningful decrease in real rents and an increase in affordability.
Public misunderstanding of housing and measuring the impact of ‘supply skepticism’; YIMBY campagining is evermore important.
Good interview with Habiba Islam on the Left and Effective Altruism. I’d like to see something similar for the Scrutonian right.
Why has nuclear power been a flop?
How much goes in tax, and how much goes to the winemaker, when you buy a bottle of wine?
An excellent set of simple statistical checks to apply to analyses in academic papers.
The new UK census maps are great.
The excellent Ethan Mollick on survivorship bias,
Jamie on Software is a big fan of book lists. Here’s a good thread from Hacker News on books that made topics finally ‘click’. A reading list on the Philosophy of Astrobiology. And a Borges reading list.
The excellent Nabeel wanted to learn more about SARS-CoV-2, so he decoded the genome. And Nabeel with some productivity advice.
Some more decent productivity advice, most of which cashes out to ‘JFDI’. “I’ll finish it up tomorrow”, I mutter to myself, as I gaze at the sticky, bulbous pile of washing up.
Very good paper on the social sciences, science funding, and research taste.
David Shor on the 2022 midterms.
Tom Forth raises an excellent question: why do we in the UK chose, so often, in so many ways, to be less productive? (One answer is, of course, NIMBYism, but the question is deeper and the answer more cultural than that.)
Smart little visualisation of a two-layer neural network learning to classify.
Working my way through this list of excellent posts on UK science and R&D.
Wikienigma: a Wikipedia for things we don’t yet know.
Benjamin Reinhardt on management styles in research.
A valiant effort, and worth it for the (very funny) write-up.