Danny's Pathologically Polymathic: November 2013

unsurprisingly, the most effective charities are not scalable - GiveWell [via GivingWhatWeCan]

methane updates in context - RealClimate

carbon dioxide remains the real problem

how praising children backfires - NYmag [via SimonClarke]

The Wheels on the Walrus go Round and Round - Oxford Blog

a series about a Sikh Singaporean policeman - Inspector Singh Investigates [my review]

one second of video a day, for a child's first year - Jezebel [via Tomlin]

collaboration and retribution in WWII Yugoslavia - The Apology and the Last Days [my review]

Indian toilet politics - Bloomberg

Antarctic workers leave "skua piles" - Far

huge amounts of processing power being used to mine bitcoins - Gizmodo

but how does this compare with the resources being used to mine gold?

the structure of academic careers in the US, Germany and UK - Afonso

"The academic job market is structured... like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders."

limit on prime gaps down to 600! - Wired [via @phaseit]

a nice summary of recent progress

imagining a post-antibiotic future - Medium

some of the walls that divide the world - Guardian

"I believe (but cannot prove) that PHP developers have souls." - Usenix [PDF via Phil]

"HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and 'ETIMEDOUT' has been written in blood on the wall."

Hannah Arendt on Australia's refugee policy - Guardian

flooding in Riyadh! - RT

James C Scott reviews Jared Diamond - LRB [via CT]

dividing North America into eleven nations - WP

stop catastrophizing relief efforts in the Philippines - Time

Save the Children and the Salvation Army are complicit in Australia's maltreatment of refugees - SMH

filling in the Arctic gap in the global temperature record - RealClimate - York

how the UK police defend us from students protesting education cuts - Guardian

Venice now covered by Google Street View - Guardian

Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics - Prime Obsession [my review]

making "being a child" an offence - Guardian

Zen-like fables about the philosophy of software development - CodelessCode

Better Research for Better Healthcare - Testing Treatments [my review]

pedestrians should be made to wear helmets - EasyRidingBike

we visit Harcourt Aboretum and Warburg Nature Reserve - Oxford Blog

a review of Krasznahorkai's latest novel, Seiobo There Below - AmericanReader

East Germany reappears in a map of the 2013 German election results - StrangeMaps

London gets first proper segregated cycle path - CyclistsCity

UK government predicts cycling will fall by 2040, against the last decade's trend - CTC

Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic - The Ghosts of Cannae [my review]

correcting myths about strange Japanese sex - Independent

"a voyeuristic fascination with Japan's strangeness, spurred on by irresponsible journalism and sensationalised headlines"