Retrospective: DriverlessCrocodile Open Browser Tabs, December 2022

Tyler Cowen thinks this is the best interview question of all time. I’m skeptical, but concede that it’s a good way of taking a snapshot of what you’re thinking about. Below is my (only slightly curated) list – many would have made it onto the blog if I was still posting daily.

I had originally planned to paste them as links, but writing them up took a lot longer than I anticipated, and all seem to be searchable with the information provided. You may be grateful for the friction/filter offered by the need to copy and paste to Google.

1. Wikipedia – Cimolestes
2. QNTM – From Ignorance, Lead Me To Truth
3. Cold-Takes – Honesty about Reading
4. Ben Kuhn – My favourite essays of life advice
5. Brett Scott – I, Token (the untold story of the hole in Bitcoin’s heart)
6. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Story Conference Transcript
7. Donald Kagan – Ave atque vale
8. Wikipedia – Technics and Civilization
9. LessWrong – Morality is Awesome
10. Wikipedia – History of Writing
11. Denise Schamndt-Besserat – The Evolution of Writing
12. The Past – The Secret History of Writing
13. Pre-Industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today’s
14. Steven Sinofsky – Writing is Thinking
15. Jeff Bezos – Letter to Shareholders (1997)
16. Wikipedia – Global Spread of the Printing Press
17. Listen Notes
18. Bryne Hobart – The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization
19. Mark J. Perry – Economic Impact of the Printing Press: Info Age 1.0
20. Jeremiah Dittmar – Information technology and economic change: The impact of the printing press
21. Nigella Lawson – American Breakfast Pancakes
22. James A. Dewar – The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead
23. ‘Moral Molecules’ – a new theory of what goodness is made of
24. Matt Clancy – Combinatorial innovation and technological progress in the very long run
25. George Orwell – Notes on Nationalism
26. Quin Hui – Dilemmas of Twenty-First Century Globalization…
27. Alexey Guzey – Where does talent come from?
28. Olivia Potts – Marmalade: A Very British Obsession
29. Tom Chivers – The genuius of John von Neumann
30. Morgan Housel – The Same Stories, Again and Again
31. Clive Thompson – How Processing and P5 Got Newbies Into Coding
32. Joan Acocella – How the Rosetta Stone Yielded its Secrets
33. Barry R. Chiswick – Review of Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth
34. Two Conspiracy Theories about Cola
35. Teach Yourself Computer Science
36. Markus Strasser – The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications
37. Karine Bengualid – Find the root cause of your productivity problem with the “5 Whys” technique
38. David Brooks – What Happened to American Conservatism?
39. Choices of Principles of Distributive Justice in Experimental Groups
40. Technorealism
41. Richard Fisher – Why ‘long rituals’ matter
42. Mark Lawson – What’s it like to star in a flop?
43. Edochess.ca – The Printing Press
44. Printing in England from William Caxton to Christopher Barker
45. Ash Milton and Stephen Pimentel – Liberal Education is Applied History
46. Julian Barnes – How did she (Penelope Fitzgerald) do it?
47. Ash Maurya – Your Product is NOT “The Product”
48. Wikipedia – List of Probability Distributions
49. 17 Affordable Dim Sum in Singapore
50. Eliezer Yudkowsky – An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem
51. Nobel Prize in Physics 1906 Award Ceremony Speech (to J.J. Thompson)
52. Alice Evans – Why is the Middle East and North Africa so Patriarchal?
53. Tyler Cowen – Why education is productive – a parable of men and beasts
54. Sean Manning – How Much Did a Shirt Really Cost in the Middle Ages?
55. Ian Leslie – How to Be Good: Three models of global social impact
56. Eberhard Arnold – Beyond Pacifism: Seven Theses on Christian Nonviolence
57. Wallace K. Ferguson – The Renaissance in Historical Thought
58. John Luttig – When Tailwinds Vanish
59. Intofilm.org – The History of Animation
60. Filmsite.org – Animated Films, Part 1
61. Professional Development Plan: What It Is and Why You Need One
62. Allen B. Downey – Think Stats: Exploratory Data Analysis in Python (v2.2)
63. Wikipedia – Gustavo Gutiérrez
64. Nate Meyvis – On distributing reading time
65. Dan Luu – What to learn
66. Ben Kuhn – No one can teach you to have conviction
67. Practical Common Lisp
68. WhatMatters.com – Unit 1 on OKRs
69. Engines4Ed – Learning by Doing
70. Paul Graham – Beating the Averages
71. Raptitude – Everything Must Be Paid for Twice
72. Revolutionary Rijksmuseum exhibution reckons with Dutch colonial conflict in Indonesia
73. The British Library – William Blake’s Printing Process
74. 9 Lines with All of Physics
75. Resourcing Urban Transformation
76. Henry Oliver – The Case for Opsimaths
77. Mark Hertling – I commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s what I saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies.
78. The Lambda Calculus for Absolute Beginners
79. Greg Wilson – … But With a Whimper
80. How to Design Programs
81. How to Read Mathematics
82. T.S. Elliot – A Song for Simeon
83. Efficiency of Recursion vs Iteration in C
84. Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock – Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action
85. C. Thi Nguyen – Objectionable.net
86. Can Education be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya
87. Garrison Lovely – Do we need a better understanding of ‘progress’?
88. Holden Karnofsky – Nonprofit Boards are Weird
89. Jake VanderPlas – Python Data Science Handbook
90. Why Does the Apostle’s Creed Say that Jesus Descended into Hell?
91. Cedric Chin – Don’t Read History for Lessons
92. Wikipedia – Four Books and Five Classics
93. Columbia University – Difference-in-Difference Estimation
94. Lant Pritchett – There is only one poverty strategy: (broad based) growth (Part 1)
95. Frederick Engels – Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith
96. Eric Gilliam – A Progress Studies History of Early MIT – Part 1: Training the engineers who built the country
97. Ed Nather – The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer
98. Daniel Jones – The 36 Questions that Lead to Love
99. Bret Devereaux – Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?
100. Giles Tremlett – Mondragon: Spain’s giant co-operative where times are hard but few go bust
101. Don-Won Kim – The Godfather of South Korea’s Chip Industry
102. Daryl Gibson – America’s most remarkable kid died in Newcastle, Utah – his legacy never will
103. Our World in Data – CO2 Emissions
104. Marc Andreessen – How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with
105. Nathan Baschez – Good Postitioning Makes Everything Easier
106. Jason Kottke – Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
107. Cedric Chin – Focus is Saying No to Good Ideas
108. Izumi Saburo – The Iwakura Mission: Japan’s 1871 Voyage to Discover the Western World
109. xkcd – Password Strength
110. A view of a million integers
111. Joseph Conrad – … the Narcissus
112. Brink Lindsey – The End of the Working Class
113. Brink Lindsey – The Retreat from Reality
114. E.B. White – Farewell, My Lovely
115. Adam Mastroianni – Good conversations have lots of doorknobs; Or, “Spiderman Is My Boyfriend”
116. Joel Mokyr – Review of Brad DeLong’s – Slouching Towards Utopia
117. Robert VerBruggen – Review of Garret Jones’ The Culture Transplant
118. Patrick McKenzie – Notes on running VaccinateCA
119. Richard Feynman on other points of view
120. Ross Douthatt – Hootie and the Blowfish and the End of History
121. Ross Douthatt – The Ambivalence of Advent
122. Dave Guarino – Masoor dal (red lentils) is a great test app for cooking
123. William Davies – The Seductions of Declinism
124. Wikipedia – Battle of Surabaya
125. Cedric Chin – The Games People Play with Cash Flow
126. Philipp Hauer – Leveling Up in the Management Skill Tree
127. Idlewords – Why Not Mars
128. Real Time West Jakarta Air Quality
129. Wikipedia – Twelfth Night (holiday)
130. Jack Geldard – Abseil Knots Explained