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Sunday, April 29

29th Apr - Weekender: Off-Topic

Definitely not anything relating to euro crisis or derivatives. Have some fun, relax, get new ideas.

Shit Happens, Economics VersionThe Big Picture
Stand-up economist Yoram Bauman doesn’t usually swear… but it’s unavoidable in this routine (“S*** happens: the economics version”). Filmed at the 2012 American Economic Association humor session in Chicago, Jan 7, 2012.

Tomb raidersFT
John Ray: From King Tutankhamen’s tomb to the Rosetta Stone, Egyptology enters the 21st century and proves to be worth further studies

Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 6 Notes EssayBlake Masters
Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 6 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. This class was kind of a crash course in VC financing.

Book BitsThe Capital Spectator
Summaries of eight recent books

The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets)Foreign Policy
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, all politics may not be sexual, but all sex is political.

The Illusion of ChoiceChart Porn
I find it as interesting to look at the minimalist design inherent in modern logos as the ownership concentrations.

PEOPLE
The First Global ManForeign Affairs
The Americas Before and After Columbus

When Einstein Met Tagorebrain pickings
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.

How Samuel L. Jackson Became His Own GenreNYT
When Jackson’s character was killed off in a version of “The Long Kiss Goodnight” that was previewed before a test audience, at least one member in the audience yelled out, “You can’t kill Sam Jackson!”

Popular Writers: A Stephen King interviewNeil Gaiman

David and Société GénéraleTestosterone Pit
Look who's fighting back: Jérôme Kerviel, the meek-looking French guy who became famous in January 2008 as the junior trader who’d lost €4.9 billion at French mega-bank Société Générale.

SCIENCE
The Crisis of Big ScienceThe New York Review of Books
Steven Weinberg: Funding is a problem for all fields of science. In the past decade, the National Science Foundation has seen the fraction of grant proposals that it can fund drop from 33 percent to 23 percent. But big science has the special problem that it can’t easily be scaled down. It does no good to build an accelerator tunnel that only goes halfway around the circle.

Shift HappensThe Chronicle Review
Steven Weinberg: If you've seen that bumper sticker, you've seen what our culture has made of one of the central ideas in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 50 years and 1.4 million copies ago.

Deep-Space Photos: Hubble’s Greatest Hits The Big Picture

GCHQ releases two Turing papersZDNet
Alan Turing papers on code breaking released by GCHQBBC
Alan Turing wartime research papers released by GCHQGCHQ
GCHQ has released two mathematical papers written by cryptographer Alan Turing after keeping the works secret for over half a century.

Immortality: For ever and ever – The Economist
Four narratives and an actuary

Annals of Higher Education: Get Rich U.The New Yorker
There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?

PSYCHOLOGY
Learn Anything Faster With The Feynman TechniqueFarnam Street

The unconscious mind: Hidden depths The Economist
New thoughts on how the mind works

Philosopher John Searle Defines Consciousnessbrain pickings
‘Consciousness is real and irreducible — you can’t get rid of it.’

Tuck into our latest round-up of the best psych and neuro links, by The British Psychological Society.