MATHEMATICS

• Feeling down? Listen to an hour of Jen Kirkman improvising as Abbie Hoffman.
• Wikipedia's list of unusual deaths is hypnotic to read, although the entries for the last few years are badly-maintained.
• Someone went through a lot of effort to nicely format the public domain classic Calculus Made Easy for the web.
• The creator of Erlang recently passed away. Once he wrote an excellent thing on Elixir and OOP in general.
• Twitter must have been down for ten minutes, because BBC News ran a story which is not only not about tweets, but which is not 85% Twitter commentary. Deaths after surgery in Scotland have dropped by more than a third after implementing a checklist. I once had a boss yell at me for making checklists, as he felt memorizing constantly-changing daily tasks was some kind of macho thing, and making lists was effeminate. He was not as smart as a surgeon.
• They just released the source for a bunch of old Infocom games, including the early Zorks, all written in an old LISP dialect, whose manual you can read here. Take a second to let that all sink in. Sample data:

<OBJECT SANDWICH-BAG
	(LOC KITCHEN-TABLE)
	(SYNONYM BAG SACK)
	(ADJECTIVE BROWN ELONGATED SMELLY)
	(DESC "brown sack")
	(FLAGS TAKEBIT CONTBIT BURNBIT)
	(FDESC
"On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers.")
	(CAPACITY 9)
	(SIZE 9)
>

• Oldie but goodie: There are plenty of ways to get relaxing ambient noise from the internet, but this one harkens back to the days when people still believed in cool, classy web apps. What happened to the web?
• Anti-marijuana add with the exact opposite-of-intended effect: STONA SLOTH. When I was a teenager, there was a Canadian ad where a couple of teenager in what looked like the office of a rich lawyer are smoking a join, and one accidentally shoots his friend in the head with his dad's gun.
• Against backstory. He doesn't mention it, but no prequel has ever been very good.
• CERN recreated the experience of the original web browser.
• I knew Google's built-in calculator could make graphs, but spinning 3D graphs like this or this? Holy heck.

• Visual Noise
• Oldie but goodie: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. Classic programmer humour which is unbelievably just shy of ten years old.
• A fun article on Lewis Carroll's What the tortoise said to Achilles. If you haven't, here is the original, which is wonderful.
• Beautiful hot-air balloon simulator in the browser, using Three.js. The new golden age was supposed to bring us.
• Overly-broad Internet laws in many countries can result in you unknowingly committing crimes. If doing stuff is outlawed, only outlaws will do stuff.
• JWZ's long-running blog is the pinnacle of programmer coolness. It's so cool that it can't be linked from Hacker News. Mosaic's home page from 1994 is still around and it feature's JWZ's original, 90s-style homepage and it is a thing of glory. Back in the 90s, mentioning Kennedy was 4% of the United States GDP.