Danny's Pathologically Polymathic: October 2014

backgrounder on Hebrew/Arab novelist Sayed Kashua - Tower [via Nathaniel]

did witches ride brooms to get high? - Atlantic

strategic air power in the Second World War - The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 [my review]

Australia takes one more step towards being a police state - Age

cars once had to be preceded by a red flag; now... - MiamiHerald

"the flags are a new concept in South Florida — as is walking"

"moral infantilism" and rhetoric about evil - Guardian

toddler jigsaw puzzles - Oxford Blog

not just comics: Alan Moore has written a million word novel - Aeon

learning mathematics is about hard work - Atlantic

call suicide help line, get killed by responding SWAT team - FreeThoughtProject

up until the mid-1980s, women were taking up computer science similarly to law and medicine - NPR

dehumanising people requires dehumanising language - Monbiot

from Australian iron ore to Marine le Pen - MPettis [via MB]

Herbert Gintis on general equilibrium and inclusive fitness - Oxford Blog

Robert Solow reviews Thomas Piketty - NewRepublic

the Electronic Intifada is under a sustained denial of service attack - FB

artificial intelligences are already raising our children - NYT

Downhill on a Forest Road (a Krasznahorkai short story) - NYT

the UK Department of Transport has aspirations - AsEasyAsRiding

how cameras can get such strange results from rolling shutters - PetaPixel [via Robbie]

better understanding of the Tracy-Widom distribution - Quanta

the Age of Loneliness - Guardian

roads produce traffic - Grist

a 2008-vintage Nokia 6300 could run one of the 1950 ENIAC weather models in under a second - UCD

background on Jill Schoolman and Archipelago Press - PublishersWeekly

traffic congestion is a huge cost to the UK economy - Sys-Con

China reducing coal consumption affects Mongolia as well as Australia - GlobalResearch

Vietnamese are bigger supporters of free markets than Americans - CNN

some myths about Ebola - Guardian

taking all the children's toys away - LWSL

Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s - MessNessyChic

Amazon is a whale in online book-selling, but in retail it faces real giants - Atlantic [via Rob]

40,000 year old rock art found in Indonesia - Conversation

the UK doesn't do mixer taps - 9gag

the risks of cycling and walking - Oxford Blog

Australian school chaplains can't proselytise, but must have a faith - SMH

Tony Abbott is a radical, not a conservative - Guardian

The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman + Suspicion [my review]

Conservative attacks on the Human Rights Act are madness - Guardian

"Maxwell Fyfe and his sponsor Winston Churchill saw the convention as a protection against the 'socialism' of Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour government"

testing group selection in social spiders - Quanta

the real reason Microsoft skipped Windows 9? - Twitter

if (version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) /* 95 and 98 */ ...

portraits of people in Gaza salvaging from the rubble - Guardian

UK policy: tax breaks for the wealthy, austerity for the poor - Huffington

Leung needs to resign, and avoid presiding over a bloodbath - Guardian