Curious Loop

Curious Loop

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The Style Guide for America’s Highways: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
The Style Guide for America’s Highways: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
Driving across America, you will encounter a wide variety of cultures, landscapes, people and animals. But the one consistent thing that will stay the same from Maine to California are the signs you pass on the highway. That is because America’s roads and highways have a big, fat style guide.
·beautifulpublicdata.com·
The Style Guide for America’s Highways: The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
Why Hard Work Beats Talent: Uncover the Real Key to Prosperity
Why Hard Work Beats Talent: Uncover the Real Key to Prosperity
Break free from the myth of talent and discover the real key to success! Learn why hard work beats talent and how to cultivate a growth mindset to achieve your goals.
·durmonski.com·
Why Hard Work Beats Talent: Uncover the Real Key to Prosperity
The Games People Play With Cash Flow
The Games People Play With Cash Flow
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
·commoncog.com·
The Games People Play With Cash Flow
Carl T. Bergstrom (@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)
Carl T. Bergstrom (@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)
Attached: 1 image For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows. -- Befriending crows is a wonderful thing. I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described. This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019. #birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends
·fediscience.org·
Carl T. Bergstrom (@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org)
The Tipping Point
The Tipping Point
From French arms to French fleets, how France changed the tides of the American Revolution
·battlefields.org·
The Tipping Point
The Overlords Finally Showed Up
The Overlords Finally Showed Up
After decades of promises, AI has finally leveled up. What does that mean for us?
·danielbmarkham.com·
The Overlords Finally Showed Up
Melissa Du
Melissa Du
My personal site
·melissadu.com·
Melissa Du
The rise and fall of peer review
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs,
That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print.
In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false.
Publishing is like winning the lottery, she told me, and the way to win is to keep stuffing the box with tickets. When very serious and successful scientists proclaim that your supposed system of scientific fact-checking is no better than chance, that’s pretty dismal.
And third: scientists take unreviewed work seriously without thinking twice. We read “preprints” and working papers and blog posts, none of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. We use data from Pew and Gallup and the government, also unreviewed.
I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place.
Peer review, like every form of censorship, merely slows down truth.
·experimentalhistory.substack.com·
The rise and fall of peer review
How type influences readability – Fonts Knowledge - Google Fonts
How type influences readability – Fonts Knowledge - Google Fonts
Reading is what we do, and readability refers to qualities of a text that make reading easier. This includes content decisions, or format decisions, which help a reader to easily engage with and comprehend the message intended by the author.
·fonts.google.com·
How type influences readability – Fonts Knowledge - Google Fonts
The Impotence of Being Clever
The Impotence of Being Clever
The cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance.
·hedgehogreview.com·
The Impotence of Being Clever
Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis—Asterisk
Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis—Asterisk
Over a decade has passed since scientists realized many of their studies were failing to replicate. How well have their attempts to fix the problem actually worked?
·asteriskmag.com·
Rebuilding After the Replication Crisis—Asterisk
The Long Linguistic Journey to 'Dagnabbit'
The Long Linguistic Journey to 'Dagnabbit'
This piece of pseudo-profanity is what's known as a taboo deformation—a word we say when we don't want to say the word.
·atlasobscura.com·
The Long Linguistic Journey to 'Dagnabbit'
Will the churn in Big Tech lead to a new period of innovation? - Open The Magazine
Will the churn in Big Tech lead to a new period of innovation? - Open The Magazine
THE RECENT NEWS about Big Tech is ominous: lower revenues and profits at several; large layoffs at some. If you add Fintech to the mix (appropriate because a lot of Fintech is based on technology-heavy blockchains and cryptocurrencies), then the collapse of crypto-exchanges is another dramatic event. There are two questions of interest: Are there … Continue reading "Will the churn in Big Tech lead to a new period of innovation?"
·openthemagazine.com·
Will the churn in Big Tech lead to a new period of innovation? - Open The Magazine
Robert W. Gore
Robert W. Gore
By literally stretching materials science to the limit, Gore invented GORE-TEX, a lightweight, waterproof fabric made from the expanded form of the polymer PTFE.
·sciencehistory.org·
Robert W. Gore
The Tragic Birth of FM Radio
The Tragic Birth of FM Radio
In 1934, much of the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. Unemployment was an epidemic, and many businesses struggled desperately to survive.
·damninteresting.com·
The Tragic Birth of FM Radio
Life in the Slow Lane - Longreads
Life in the Slow Lane - Longreads
Olivia Potts | Longreads | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,649 words) It’s six in the morning, and Robert Booth has already been on the road for three hours. Sitting alongside him in the cab of his lorry (the British term for a truck) is Louis, Robert’s small dog, a Jack Russell-chihuahua mix, and a washing-up bowl […]
·longreads.com·
Life in the Slow Lane - Longreads
The Ancient Japanese Technique That Produces Lumber Without Cutting Trees
The Ancient Japanese Technique That Produces Lumber Without Cutting Trees
Daisugi is an ancient Japanese forestry technique in which planted cedars are pruned in a special way to produce "shoots" that eventually become perfect, straight, knot-free lumber.This is an ancient method, developed in the 14th century, which was originally used by people living in the Kitayama region of Japan becaus
·dsfantiquejewelry.com·
The Ancient Japanese Technique That Produces Lumber Without Cutting Trees
Pristine meteorite found within hours of hitting Earth
Pristine meteorite found within hours of hitting Earth
Samples of the Winchcombe meteorite quickly revealed its origins trace back beyond Mars to the asteroid belt, shedding light on the birth of the solar system.
·astronomy.com·
Pristine meteorite found within hours of hitting Earth