July 2015

a profile of "mad mathematician" John Conway - Guardian

a tangibly programmable robot - Primo.io [via Rob]

around Korea with a blind guide dog - No One Writes Back [my review]

true safety for people on bicycles lies with design - @AsEasyAsRiding

examples of UK immigration policy run mad - OpenDemocracy

Kazakhstan's Astana is one of the strangest capital cities - Guardian

skunks are not mustelids: advances in mammal systematics - TetZoo

how hunger can make you angry - Conversation

the default gender: toddlers and pronouns - OxfordBlog

the UK should definitely abolish the regressive National Insurance tax - Guardian

nice map illustrates how unevenly the world's population is distributed - ScienceAlert

a profile of mathematician Terry Tao - NYT

aviation as a model for understanding the future of the Internet - IdleWords [via Cosma]

the Navier-Stokes equations are incomplete - Quanta

Qur'an fragments radiocarbon-dated to before 645! - Guardian

James Mickens in full flight on CSS, HTML and Javascript - Usenix [PDF]

my personal history with fractals - OxfordBlog

it's possible to win a French scrabble competition without being able to speak French - Guardian

dismantling the UK welfare state, bit by bit - Guardian

talking to Pluto is hard - Planetary

a Dutch perspective on just how crap London's cycling infrastructure is - muxblog

Geometry Revealed: A Jacob's Ladder to Modern Higher Geometry [my review]

a Russian sequel to Lord of the Rings, from the perspective of the defeated

starting intentional teaching too early can be harmful - Bedrock

brain pseudoscience: the rise of neurobollocks - NewStatesman

incubators for premature babies were first used by freak shows - NPR

they use hydrogen in bombs, so insist on hydrogen-free water! - IFLScience

increasing helmet wearing by cyclists is a sign of failure - AlternativeDFT

an interview with statistician Ben Goldacre - StatisticsViews

cycling and the law (in the UK) - BikeHub

rookie independent Australian politician has learned on the job - SaturdayPaper [via @seancarmody]

a fun-sounding Oliver Jeffers exhibition in London - AliceWriting

how German debts were written off in 1953 - Guardian

Frank Herbert's Dune fifty years on - Guardian

"resettling the entire 5.5m residents of Hong Kong in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles" - Guardian

the surreal "dreams" of Google's image recognition software - QZ