So awesome … 😀
Tag: Internet Finds
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
A very interesting read on how our society has created jobs that are basically pointless.
Regex Crossword
Regex Crossword is a brilliant game idea for computer geeks. 😀
Statt kausal-logischer Ermittlungsarbeit, computergestützte Wahrsagerei
Die Süddeutsche stellt sich die Frage “warum demokratische Regierungen so große Angst vor ihren Bevölkerungen haben” … und beantwortet sie eigentlich nicht. :(Dem Artikel kann man dennoch etwas Gutes abgewinnen, da die Begründungen für die Datensammelwut von Behörden und Geheimdiensten und ihr tatsächlicher Nutzen zur Sprache kommen, die im folgenden Zitat gut zusammengefasst sind:
Statt kausal-logischer Ermittlungsarbeit betreibt man eher computergestützte Wahrsagerei, der man umso mehr glaubt, je mehr Daten, Profile, Verhaltensmuster in der Datenbank lagern.
A Feast For Language Geeks
My brother just gave me a great present for ‘Eid: he sent me a link to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center’s (DLIFLC) Language Survival Kits. It’s unsurprisingly a little heavy on the vocabulary necessary/useful for foreign occupants (yay, USA!) … but it’s still a lot of fun. 😀
They provide the same set of sentences in several dozen languages with translations, transliterations and native writing. To top it off they have audio samples for unfamiliar sounds in each language and with a native speaker saying the sentences out loud and then saying them slow in order for you to repeat them … awesome! 😀
Interesting omissions from the list are German and South Korean, while the list even contains separate entries for several regional dialects of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashto, etc. … o.O
Earth as seen from Saturn and Mercury
NASA has put together awesome pictures of Earth from opposing sides of our solar system shot from Saturn (by Cassini) and from Mercury (by MESSENGER).
Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python
Raymond Hettinger gives a great, concise and immediately useful examples of idiomatic Python.
Summarizing the NSA Surveillance Program
Summarizing the NSA surveillance program:
Why is this secret?
We had a hunch, you wouldn’t like it.
What did it accomplish?
Nothing yet, we are still waiting for the big coup, that will silence all critics.
How much does it cost?
We don’t know exactly, you know, secret budgets and stuff. Probably somewhere in the billions.
This is basically the confirmation of the things I wrote over a year ago (German).
Reporting 1.2k crashes
Interesting proposition: how do you report 1.2k crashes at once?
Fareed Zakaria’s Talk at the Bon Mot Book Club
Fareed Zakaria talks about how where you come from deeply biases how you view world events, how this ties in with a truly global economy. He also talks about “how we are building a global economy [and] a global society quicker, than we have a global political system, that can deal with it.”
He argues that since the late 1970s two major forces are shaping our world:
1. secular, interconnected, interdependent markets and trade
2. large scale religious and nationalist movements