Danny's Pathologically Polymathic: August 2020

Syrian refugees in Germany: Angela Merkel's "We'll manage this" has proved right - Guardian

Star Wars elitism versus Star Trek democracy - Salon [David Brin]

(he doesn't seem to understand Homer at all)

this is so backwards: commuting is actively harmful, and workers will still get their lunches - Guardian

widespread flooding in Karachi after heavy rain - DW

"To be Lebanese is to be broken-hearted" - GQmiddleeast

meet Ant Group, the world's largest fintech company - Medium

high-rise lifts are a coronavirus nightmare - Wired

purposeful storytelling in primary mathematics - YouTube [via @Suchmo83]

the anatomy of a BIND zone file - arstTechnica

(something I had to deal with in my previous job)

Street Design Standards: Current and Withdrawn Practice - Urban Design Group [via @Graham_P_Smith]

street design and cycling: Copenhagen versus Amsterdam - YouTube [10min video]

adventures in archaic units: the US is about to lose one of its "feet" - NYT

2000 metres is 6561.68 international feet but only 6561.67 US survey feet

reading at seven and a half: long books - Oxford Blog

a large cohort study suggests cycling to work really will keep you alive - Lancet

"bicycle commuting was associated with a reduced rate of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, and cancer mortality, and incident cancer, compared with commuting by private motorised vehicle"

many of England's private schools have ditched 'drill and kill' - Guardian

The Poetry of the _Mahabharata_ - Erenow

the afterword to Carole Satyamurti's retelling

floods in Jaipur (Rajasthan, India) - India Today

early European images of Australian animals - Latrobe Journal

Cook on Kangaroos: "it was of a light mouse Colour and the full size of a Grey Hound, and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail, which it carried like a Grey hound"

the PRC spent its first 30 years with impoverished statistical tools - Aeon

is India's dwindling Parsi (Zoroastrian) community doomed by its opposition to conversion? - Guardian

curfew and lockdown leave Melbourne's streets deserted - Guardian

some thoughts on the widened cycle lanes on Magdalen Bridge - Oxford Blog [niche kerb-nerdery]

most people still think the Hiroshima bomb was necessary to end the war - BulletinAtomicScientists

"those who believe the bombings were necessary and effective at significantly shortening the war are more likely to harbor skepticism toward nuclear disarmament"

Trans-Himalayan language phylogenetics: history and current state - Sprachwissenschaft [PDF]

it "still appears to hold that no rice agricultural terminology can be confidently reconstructed for the Tibeto-Burman phylum"

a lovely old-school "Web 0.5" fan page for Ron Graham - UCSD

an obituary for mathematician Ron Graham - Guardian

how car parking works in Japan: podcast + summary - Reinventing Parking

does fairness conflict with efficiency in congestion pricing? - Transfers Magazine

"buying a child's way into Yale is today's equivalent of a nineteenth-century industrial tycoon buying an aristocratic title" - Boston Review

Of course 2 + 2 = 4 is cultural. That doesn't mean the sum could be anything else - MAA

(and it's 1 or 0 in ℤ₃ or ℤ₄)

cities worldwide fast-forward plans to shift commuters to cycling - WSJ