I used to gather some “cool stuff from the Internet” a long, long time ago on my French blog. Since then, that sort of “content gathering” has mostly been moved to social networks; let’s see if I can put that back in blog form instead. This could actually be a nice Friday post 🙂

Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? A: Because Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models – a very funny keynote by James Mickens, with an intro to machine learning in the middle, and a lot of snark about machine learning, internet of things, and the tech environment in general. (I typically do NOT watch ~1h videos on my computer. I watched that one.)

A Mercator globe [animated image]: that cracked me up 🙂

The weird power of the placebo effect, explained [text] – a fascinating article about the placebo effect. I was aware of a fair amount of the claims already, but still – that’s mind-blowing.

Matt Leacock’s 2019 Game Selection Guide – a funny flowchart about Matt Leacock’s (known in particular for Pandemic) games.

Modern Mrs Darcy’s 2019 Reading Challenge – I discovered MMD late last year, and I quite like what she does, even though we don’t necessarily have much in common (so far?) literature-wise. The Reading Challenge seems pretty fun, so I’ll try to tick the boxes this year.

To Wash It All Away [text, PDF] – an hilarious piece by James Mickens (yeah, the same one as in the video of the first link) about the terrible, terrible state of web technologies. It’s awfully mean, but delightfully and well-writtenly so.

The speed of light is torturously slow, and these 3 simple animations by a scientist at NASA prove it [text + animated images] – a neat article with a few animations to show, indeed, how slow the speed of light is.

Orders of Magnitude [image] and Observable universe logarithmic illustration [image] – some very pretty illustrations of the universe (one in layers at different scales, one in logarithmic scale) from Pablo Carlos Budassi, taken from the article above.

Gygax – 2nd Edition Review [text, music] – a review of one of my favorite albums this year – and actually the review that made me listen to it in the first place. GUYS: IT’S D&D METAL. IT’S BRILLIANT. The only annoying thing is that it tends to make me dance at my desk more often than other albums.

The Hot New Asset Class Is Lego Sets [text] – if you need an excuse to buy LEGO, you can just say it’s a way to diversify your portfolio, ‘cuz Bloomberg said so. Or you can just buy LEGO for the sake of it.