Danny's Pathologically Polymathic: November 2012

citizenship, residency, and 'who' versus 'whom' - LL

a genuinely global database: Google Spanner - Wired - Google [PDF]

what would be so bad about Palestine joining the International Criminal Court? - Guardian

the scary possibilities of permafrost carbon release - SMH - UNEP [PDF]

the report contains a nice introduction to permafrost science

obsessions talking past one another - A House in Istria [my review]

a history of Fraktur - StrangeMaps

the effect of the UK's welfare cuts - Guardian

the great vegan honey debate - Slate

China finally has a leader who speaks Mandarin - Atlantic [via LL]

2 degrees of warming will be bad; 4 or 6 would be terrible - Laden

"a 20% chance that temperatures will warm by more than 4°C by 2100, possibly 4°C by 2060"

the EU finally bans shark-finning - Guardian

Catalonia is about to vote on independence - Guardian

a big boost for disestablishmentarianism - Guardian

Parliament should legislate to only allow the 26 bishops to sit in the Lords if a third of them are women

children no longer engage with nature - Monbiot

Swiss cantons start to claw back tax exemptions for the ultra-rich - Bloomberg

women don't get their share of group conversations - Jezebel

Daniel Davies on black swans and fat tails - CT

"the Great Depression and the Russian Revolution did actually happen - they weren't just particularly inaccurate observations of the true underlying economic growth rate"

adventures with tcpdump - Naguib [via @phaseit]

remembering what widespread polio was like - Mamamia

unlike 'Supreme Court Justice' or 'world chess champion', 'princess' is not a career - DailyLife

a middle-aged white American man lectures the Republicans - EricGarland

Judit Polgar is still playing chess - Guardian

The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative - Circles Disturbed [my review]

pictures of Venice in flood - Guardian

one place that is not going to fare well with sea level rise

the power of bicycles in disaster - AtlanticCities

Frequentist-Bayes counter to today's xkcd cartoon - Cosma - CMU [PDF via Cosma]

Mochizuki and the ABC conjecture - Globe [via @phaseit]

Sydney is building some cycling infrastructure! - SydneyCycleways

Nate Silver gives Romney an 8% chance of an upset - 538

Better Block: urban renewal in Dallas - TED/Youtube [via ibikelondon]

Language and Culture among the Haredim in Israel - Sacred Speakers [my review]

Bloomberg Businessweek puts it bluntly: "IT'S GLOBAL WARMING, STUPID" - ThinkProgress

how New York's food distribution systems are coping - Grist