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.

GPS, Galileo & More: How do they work & what happened during the big outage?
This article is fascinating. GPS is so critical and it is ubiquitous that it not working would be shocking. Makes you think about all the people who have to show up at their job for our modern life to continue on as always. It's an underrated accomplishment of humanity.

What’s the Point? Pondering the value of art in this trying time.

Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668? That this happens and works is amazing.

Corey Robin teases out the philosophy of Clarence Thomas It's always interesting to dig into people's thoughts and philosophy particularly when they have so much influence.

These Guys Just Drove an E63 AMG Across America in a Record 27 Hours 25 Minutes
I found this style of race when I was a teenager on the early web. It was a teenage dream of mine to go on such a run. It involves a lot of work and a lot of luck.

It's the time for the Illusion of the Year and what a wonderful time it is. I've seen a number of posts about the winner but I think the true standout is the second place. It's one of those rare illusions that is very easy to change simply by changing perspective.

Glass artist Satoshi Tomizu has been making these glass pendants for a couple of years but I just came across them. Sadly most of the information about them is in Japanese. They are absolutely stunning works of art that appear to contain a whole solar system in the palm of your hand. He has a lottery going on right now to allow people to purchase the next batch of them but it looks like it will only be going on for a couple more hours so move quickly if you want one.

I'm always a sucker for series of great photos and the Guardian has an excellent writeup on the Historic Photographer of the Year with the top submissions. The original site also has a gallary with all the submissions if you want to scroll though for a long while.

This is really a wonderful edition of Euclid's Elements that has been done by Nicholas Rougeux. I'll confess to having not read or looked at Elements since my schooling. This got me to site down and look though it for a while. I just love the little touches that they have done.

Links

HF Propagation and Earthquakes Maybe we will be able to predict earthquakes soon? This would be a huge win as a little bit of advanced warning could save a lot of lives.

How to Buy Drugs Not where I expected to read this piece but I have to say that it's a really good writeup of a subject that needs more attention. It appears like some aspects of the darknet markets are positive.

Philip Glass on lineage vs. legacy This in some ways mirrors my own internal views. I can't help but think that this is a more balanced way to look at the world.

An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms This looks like an excellent introduction to the topic. It also really shows the power of the internet as a method of teaching interactive content.

Media/Games

I continue to play a absolute ton of Tetris 99 on the Switch. This is everything I want in a game, quick, easy to hop in and out of, and deeply challenging. Highly recommended.

I also picked up Mindustry this week. It's a heavily inspired Factorio descendant that has a fascinating progression mechanic as well. It's cheap and very well done. All the code is open source on github as well.

This is an excellent write up by Stavros Korokithakis about how to make and use a light stick painting device. It has a fasinating selection of pictures and shows some really cool effects. It looks like it should be a pretty cheap and easy build as well.

I don't know if I knew that I wanted to watch a releastic orchestra arrangements of animals but the studio Illogic has shown exceptional talent in making this video.

This photo is a massive zoomable image of the Triangulum Galaxy that clocks in at a massive 1.6gb for the full image. You can find more about this specific photo on Hubble Space Telescope's website. I would highly recommend zooming in all the way. Seeing the density of stars in this image truely just impresses on the absolute scale of the university.

I'm abandoning the idea that these are regularly scheduled in any way and just going to dump these links when I feel it's appropriate.

This is your phone on feminism

I don't agree with the whole article but the first section is deeply insightful. This has been mentally summing into a category that is roughly defined as "tech not working for it's users".

Four Key Things You Should Know About Health Care

It's hard to cut though and understand what's actually happening, hopefully this article helps a bit. I would love to read a meta-research roundup on key issues regularly.

Absolute scale corrupts absolutely

Another article that connects to a subject I've been thinking about lately. My guess is that large vs small communities swings back and forth. Small communities make it easier to have trust and know everyone. Big communities allow content discovery from all corners and have no barrier to entry. My guess is that both have their place but small communities were less popular with the invention of internet wide scale. My wish is for more small communities in both IRL and on the internet.

Creed

They are much braver than I and it gives me hope to know that such people exist.

I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could

A humanist story to consider when thinking about the value of lying.

“But I’m not a lawyer. I’m an agent.”

On the value of professional responsibility. I can't begin to explain how rotten this must feel.