Random things I’ve been reading this week

(I’m going to stop recording hour counts here, as it’s fiddly to keep track of separately from tagtime and you probably don’t care. This remains a random sample by time though)

• Soul of a new Machine
• Finding the number of clusters in a data set
• If you want a real political revolution, support a charity
• I fly 747s for a living. Here are the amazing things I see every day.
• The ‘transferable skills’ paradigm is cover for the creation of transferable people
• The High Cost of Free Parking
• CDNs aren’t just for caching
• Teachers: Much more than you wanted to know

Specific things I’ve been reading this week

Here are some things I’ve read in the last week that were memorable and interesting enough to note here but didn’t actually get a tagtime ping (this is mostly mined from my read items in feedbin and stars on twitter). As such this is a much more biased sample of what I actually read than the above, but maybe it’s also interesting for rather than despite that.

• Why women earn less: Just two factors explain post-PhD pay gap
• Returning from the threshold of misery
• The odds are you won’t know when to quit
• The origin of wheatley
• For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER
• The Killer Hiding in the CDC Map

Gifted books

No wishlist books this week. That’s really very OK given that it was a slow reading week and I’m massively backed up on books right now.

I did do an interesting thing with my wishlist though, which is that I wrote a script that randomly shuffles items to the top: The list is rather huge and keeps growing, and because of the way Amazon displays it to people that creates a massive recency bias, so this is designed to offset that by taking five random books from history and move them to the top.

Caveat emptor: I’ve only tested this on my one wishlist, and while I believe it is allowed in the Amazon terms of services I Am Not A Lawyer.