Several excellent photo collections I have been collecting in my tabs and haven’t gotten to posting. First there’s the National Geographic Photo Contest, with both In Focus and The Big Picture picking their favorites (the shark, yikes!). Then there’s the In Focus picks from the Documeria project from the 1970s. Love these, the world of my childhood looks like such an alien place.
The stuff I read in Instapaper and like I usually post here via my phone, so I don’t always include attribution, but it’s usually stuff I’ve picked up from the editor’s feed at Longform.org. They provide a really nicely curated collection of longer pieces. Check ‘em out.
Hyperbole and a Half, Adventures in Depression. I am late in posting this, but for the three of you out there who haven’t seen it already, it’s so good.
Cool site The Good Pocket sent me to cool leather goods craftsmen Saddleback Leather which provided cool Leather 101 primer. This bit made me laugh:
Here’s how it works. A hiker finds a cow dying in the wilderness. The cow dies.
I just put this on my pile of favorite xkcd strips: Map Projections.
Kurt Andersen on the Large Hadron Collider. "The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe."
The King of Human Error by Michael Lewis. "Kahneman [in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow] walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason. The story he tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off."
The Little Pill that Could Cure Alcoholism. "It’s not extraordinary that, despite all his efforts and his obvious intelligence and commitment, Dr Ameisen failed to overcome his addiction. What is extraordinary is that he eventually discovered a drug he claims has cured him of alcoholism and that he claims can cure all addictions, including cocaine, heroin, smoking, bulimia and anorexia, compulsive shopping and gambling. Because that is, according to all other schools of thought, simply impossible."
Resistance Is Futile. "Antibiotics are an exhaustible resource. We should be treating them like an oil field, or an endangered species. Instead, we handle them like consumer electronics."
The Shadow Superpower. "The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure — call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan — it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). The gap is narrowing, though, and if the United States doesn’t snap out of its current funk, the USSR/Bazaaristan could conceivably catch it sometime this century."