joshuago’s Bookmarks

The Oatmeal gets a thorough and very favourable treatment by The Economist. It's making money.

Introverts don't outwardly complain, but instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness.

Comparative discussion of how native tribes in Canada and Polynesia are dealing with the influx of industrially processed food. Includes anecdote about navigating the seas not with a compass or using the stars, but with one's nutsack.

A very entertaining and well-written account of how a programmer went from nothing to clients knocking down his doors asking him to work on open source software enhancements. It all started when he figured out how to write a module for nginx.

Just as Max Kleiber described animal scaling laws with equations, Geoffrey West has discovered laws that govern how entire cities function.

Firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contracts when short-term contracts are too bothersome.

Cheating in higher education is horrifyingly widespread. A lot of the people running around with master's degrees had their theses written by someone else.

A great summary of the new things in the Ruby and Rails communities over the course of 2010. Good for reference when trying to keep up with all the new technology out there, even for seasoned Ruby programmers.

A really touching story reminding us to stop and help each other out. Will make you love Mexican people.

An open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers.