MATHEMATICS

• I feel like there used to be a lot of interesting Year In Review lists. This year, all I really enjoyed was The Onion's Our Annual Year. Maybe lists have changed, maybe I've changed. Who knows.
• Snow on the sea
• Taming randomness
• Comedy genius Billy Connolly recently gave an interview about Parkinson's where he said he could feel his life slipping away. He just release a much more chipper follow up video showing that he has nearly completely transformed into Colonel Sanders.

• Some guys fixing the Apollo 11 guidance computer. There are no words to describe how this makes me feel.
• JWZ on accepting donations in cryptocurrencies. "They started accepting donations in these magic beans a while back, perhaps before the true toxicity of cryptocurrencies was widely understood. Back when it just seemed like a neat trick, like running wifi off of a potato battery."
• Yesterday's Wiktionary word of the day was in Zulu. If you think Finnish is inflectional morphology porn, just look at all the ways to conjugate and decline this root.
• Frankie Boyle's Year In Review. In addition to the article, he did a TV special which is well worth watching if you can.
• ThreeBlueOneBrown's newest video But WHY is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow?

• Exploiting vs. Exploring
• "'The Goblin Market', as I Understand It"
• English Society, 1560-1640 (Yale Lecture)
• Mongolians in China still use a purely top-to-bottom script, and arrange their websites accordingly. Take a look.

• 13 games in in less than 13kB of Javascript with links to source code.
• trashloop.com
• Euclid's Orchard (pictured)
• War is hell

• The Gilbert Gottcast recently did one of its best episodes ever with Bruce Vilanch, who is as funny and interesting as people say he is, even though he never seems to be.
• What's the difference between a pointer and an integer? The article's added bonus is some fun C trivia, which is always nice to have.
• Someone made a colouring book based on visualizing neat ideas in mathematics.
• Encasing a girl in ice was a popular marketing stunt in the 60s. "Her icy coffin will be on display 24 hours a day."
• Some pictures of a working-class neighbourhood in Lisbon in the early 20th century.
• A really, really good tutorial on how to make a toy operating system. As the writer points out, University courses will teach you a lot of advanced topics in OS design, but not a simple 'hello world'.

This book is meant to make fun of Leibniz. It's fairly funny and I enjoyed it as a teenager, before I was familiar with Voltaire's other works.

Leibniz has a spotty record as a philosopher, but his contributions to mathematics go far beyond the calculus you normally hear about. His fingerprints are all over pure math and formal logic and computer science and computer hardware and engineering in general. Next time you're in an airplane and it doesn't crash, thank Leibniz twenty times over.

Voltaire, on the other hand, was a rich, sarcastic dickhead whose rants against Jewish and Black people were extremely racist even by the standards of the 18th century. Screw this book.

• The life of a clownfish
• There are a lot of flaky Confucius quotes floating around the Internet. Treat yourself to some real Confucius.. This is from the Liji, the other main source for Confucius besides the Analects.
• David Wong found out some creepy things about the Netflix algorithm
• Tries as the evolution of nothing
• Having a bad day