"Omne ignotum pro magnifico est." - Tacitus

Everything unknown is assumed to be grand.

Reading this book made it crystal clear that I had been undervaluing dictionaries in my entire life. Since my earliest memories there has always been one in the bookshelf. It's difficult to imagine life without one. Caught in the Web of Words is the excellent story of the primary editor James Murray from his birth to his death and tells the story of the creation of the Oxford Dictionary along the way.

Compiling that first dictionary wasn't an easy task at all. It had to be done by paper quotes quotes being sent in from around the world. It had to be processed, checked and edited before being sent to the printers. It was a truly difficult task that took most of James Murray's life and in fact, all of his children also helped in assembling the dictionary.

This is really a wonderful book. The author appears to be a granddaughter so there is clearly a fondness for James Murray present. The roughest part of the book is the first 20% which contains a detailed telling of the upbringing of James Murray's life. It has a great deal to say about where he got his character and views but it's not nearly as interesting as the second half of the book. One thing that I wish had been discussed more is the work process for actually making the dictionary. Overall it's worth a read if you are interested in the subject material.

The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day The Browser remains an incredible source for interesting and informative articles. This covers a subject that I wish was studied more which is how he reads and processes all that information in a day. Quite informative and disappointing that we don't have better tooling.

Fast It should be possible to build things even faster than we could before but yet we seem to be slowing down.

The Pineapple Fund Donated $55,000,000 in Nonprofit Bitcoin Grants. Here's What Happened:
A followup on what happened to the individual charities that accepted money from the Pineapple Fund. Is this maybe the first case of true anonymous philanthropy on this scale?

Deep Sea Humans are visual and this is one of the best sites I've seen explain just how deep the ocean is and where creatures live in it. It's truely astonishing that life reaches as many places as it does.

In terms of games, the only one that I've recently been playing is Hades. Hades is an excellent roguelite from Supergiant who are the developers of Bastion. I think that Hades has better combat mechanics then Bastion and is going to get substantially more popular than it is.

This is a review of a book called On Freedom by Cass Sunstein. It's pretty short actually which is appreciated. It's a tiny green book with pretty small print, and you can fly through it in an hour or two. It is a thoughtful book in some respects, but I also think it suffers from some large problems for a wide audience due to the length.

The first comment I'll make is that it helps a great deal to be sort of intimately familiar with his work beforehand. I think he does some job of explaining his ideas, and his thought process, and how he got there. It seems like structurally it would be very hard to follow, and almost overwhelming, if you weren't already acquainted with his work. The best introduction to the topic is Nudge, which is a book he wrote with Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler. It lays out a groundwork to these ideas.

On Freedom takes a direct approach towards some of the philosophical questions that you could raise with this idea of nudging people, in some ways without them knowing it, and really sort of provides a moral backing. So why he thinks nudging people is acceptable, and sort of what principles and guidelines he thinks are good guiding factors for how to nudge people. And I'll be honest here, I found this not terribly persuasive. I think nudging is probably beneficial, but I thought the arguments as they are laid out in the book were pretty nuanced and lack a bit of tying together. An additional 50 pages of length to explain some of the ideas better and to put a bit more structure around the argument would have be appreciated.

I think overall it's a good book, and it's a worthwhile read. If you've read everything else up to this point about kind of this area, then it is definitely a worth grabbing a copy. Philosophy is going to become more important with respect to interventions upon people where the government might be influencing their choices. Some of the techniques that are discussed are widely in use and are becoming more so with the challenges of the world. Thoughts along these lines about the morality with such choices deserve more attention. I don't quite think this book delivers a complete and comprehensive answer, but it's a great start.

Cercle is this very cool concept that takes the concept of music performance and inverts it by doing shows in really unique locations and livestreaming them to everyone around the world. The sets are typically pretty short, the visuals are generally gorgeous and you can find the recording on their youtube channel. Recently thought, Cercle did a set with an artist that I really enjoy, FKJ, and I wanted to highlight it.