Pathologically Polymathic (Blog)

Web pages I've been reading (and some web pages I've created)

IT: LWN | W - News: AA | ABC | Dutch News | Irish | BBC | CDT | Crikey | CSM | DW | Econ | FL | Guard | Indy | NYROB | RT | yle

Last update: 20 April 2024 (RSS, twitter, Facebook)

long biographical piece on Daniel Dennett New Yorker

the Conservatives no longer seek to conserve Chris Skidmore

the demise of the driver West Midlands traffic police

large language models implement a classic "psychic's con" Software Crisis

a history of "British Chinese" cusine Serious Eats

"Selective attachment processes in ancient gold ore beneficiation" Minerals Engineering

how Brexit wrecked the British stock market Wealth of Nations

sets of points in the plane that are all integer distances apart: new results Quanta Magazine

Korea's 4B movement: feminism against the patriarchy Cut

the flaws in China's Myanmar strategy Irrawaddy

"a character study, but one with an involving geographical and social setting and with good pacing and effective integration of its sub-stories" The Pastor [my review]

local bus services are better value than large transport projects Guardian

Glasgow's "Rusty Bridge" - undoing community severance BBC

Empire of the Ants: supercolonies and people Guardian

imminent famine: 1.1 million people face catastrophic food insecurity IPC

Going to Church in Medieval England [my review]

"a fairly comprehensive survey — who was involved, what they did and when, and the broader context, social, institutional, architectural and liturgical"

ideas for a proper strategic cycle network for Sydney Daniel Morrison

cities that lowered speed limits to 30km/hr (19mph) don't regret it European Data Journalism Network

people don't drive as well as they think they do BBC

Pankay Mishra on the Holocaust and Gaza LRB

"I had grown up imbibing some of the reverential Zionism of my family of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India"

single-sex schooling and educational performance BERJ

"We find no association between attending single-sex schools and performance in mathematics, reading or science scores for either males or females"

rebuilding Oxford's Plain as a Dutch-style roundabout will require a major reduction in peak traffic flows TRL

"The impact of the new layout compared with an equivalent conventional roundabout with the same travel patterns was to reduce capacity by a little over 40%."

an update on London's cycling boom Bloomberg

the effects of 30km/hr (20mph) speed limits in European cities Norwegian Centre for Transport Research

"the measure has produced desired effects, such as lower speeds, high levels of compliance, reduced noise and local pollution, no increase in travel time or congestion for vehicular traffic, and significantly fewer accidents, especially serious ones and those involving pedestrians and cyclists"

visiting Sydney: some thoughts on public transport Oxford Blog

"an accessible overview of one of the most mysterious of ancient urban cultures" Indus [my review]

the decipherment of the Herculaneum papyri Nature

Cyclists and autonomous vehicles at odds AI & Society

"priorities for AI-enabled mobility and cyclist needs be advanced in proportion to the extent that they contribute to societal goals of urban containment, public realm, and proximal cities"

single-sex schooling and educational performance BERJ

"after controlling... we find... no significant difference in performance for girls or boys who attend single-sex schools compared to their mixed-school peers in science, mathematics or reading"

why are women so good at chess? Proceedings of the Royal Society B [PDF]

"96 per cent of the observed difference would be expected given the much greater number of men who play chess. There is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for"

a good summary of Sydney's housing and transport challenges ABC

it needs to be legal to advertise infant formula Iceland

misogyny and feminism are behind South Korea's startlingly low birth rate Atlantic

social cohesion in Britain and Japan Equality Trust

Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands have committed to Vision Zero Action Vision Zero

tools to achieve it include traffic reduction, speed reduction, and other safer infrastructure changes

congestion in cities: is road capacity expansion a solution? Science Direct

"increasing network capacity is in general not an efficient solution to manage congestion, in the sense that the average travel speed in the network does not increase substantially with an increase in capacity"

meeting some of Oxford's bell-ringers Oxford Sausage

increased risk of a California megastorm/megaflood with global heating Weather West

why Australian cities keep laying "hot" black asphalt ABC

should temperature be defined in terms of entropy (as Joules/bit)? arXiv

Notes

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Pathologically Polymathic (Blog)

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