Here is a question to think about. If religions help to create social capital by allowing people to signal conscientiousness, conformity, and trustworthiness [as Norenzayan claims], how does this relate to Bryan Caplan’s view that obtaining a college degree performs that function?
That might explain why the credentialist societies of Han China were relatively irreligious. Kling likes to use the Vickies/Thetes metaphor from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, and I think this dichotomy could play well with that. Wouldn't the tests required by the Reformed Distributed Republic fill this role, for instance?
Ariel Procaccia :: Alien journals
Steve Landsburg :: RIP, Ronald Coase
This is by far the best, simplest explanation of Coase's insights that I have read. Having read plenty of Landsburg, that should not — indeed does not — surprise me.
His final 'graph is a digression, but a good point:
Coase’s Nobel Prize winning paper is surely one of the landmark papers of 20th century economics. It’s also entirely non-technical (which is fine), and (in my opinion) ridiculously verbose (which is annoying). It’s littered with numerical examples intended to illustrate several different but related points, but the points and the examples are so jumbled together that it’s often difficult to tell what point is being illustrated... Pioneering work is rarely presented cleanly, and Coase was a true pioneer.
And this is why I put little stock in "primary sources" when it comes to STEM. The intersection between people/publications who originate profound ideas and people/publications which explain profound ideas well is a narrow one. If what you want is the latter, don't automatically mistake it for the former. The best researchers are not the best teachers, and this is true as much for papers as it is for people.
That said, sometimes the originals are very good. Here are two other opinions on this, from Federico Pereiro and John Cook.
Prosthetic Knowledge :: Prototypo.io
Start a font by tweaking all glyphs at once. With more than twenty parameters, design custom classical or experimental shapes. Once prototyping of the font is done, each point and curve of a glyph can be easily modified. Explore, modify, compare, export with infinite variations.
I liked this better when it was called Metafont.
Sorry, I couldn't resist some snark. I actually do like this project. I love both Processing and typography, so why wouldn't I? Speaking of which...
Hoefler & Frere-Jones :: Pilcrow & Capitulum
Eric Pement :: Using SED to make indexes for books
That's some impressive SED-fu.
Mike Duncan :: Revolutions Podcast
(Okay, so technically this may not belong on a "reading list.") Duncan previously created The History of Rome podcast, which is one of my favorites. Revolutions is his new project, and it just launched. Get on board now.
Kenneth Moreland :: Diverging Color Maps for Scientific Visualization [pdf]
Ardi, Tan & Yim :: Color Palette Generation for Nominal Encodings [pdf]
These two have been really helpful in the new visualization project I'm working on.
Andrew Shikiar :: Predicting Kiva Loan Defaults
Brett Victor :: Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction: A Systematic Approach to Interactive Visualization
This would be a great starting place for high-school or freshmen STEM curricula. As a bonus, it has this nice epigraph from Richard Hamming:
"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."
Megan McArdle :: 13 Tips for Jobless Grads on Surviving the Basement Years
I'm at the tail end of a doctoral program and going on the job market. This is good advice. What's disappointing is that this would have been equally good and applicable advice for people going on the job market back when I started grad school. The fact that we're five years (!!) down the road and we still have need of these sorts of "surviving in horrid job markets" pieces is bleak.