Danny's Pathologically Polymathic: October 2015

mapping the most popular languages after English and Spanish, for each US state - Slate

German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Navajo, Korean, but also Russian, Dakota, Hmong, Arabic, Portuguese and Polish

archaea with genes linked to eukaryotic cytoskeletons? - Quanta

an inventive Oulipian medley - Winter Journeys [my review]

list-driven patient-doctor interactions? - EdwardTufte

what are the actual options if Britain leaves the EU? - NewStatesman

bicycle helmets: odds ratios are not the same as risk ratios - Fietsberaad

the Space Shuttle was not a rational design; manned space flight is a charade - IdleWords

moving beyond equations: empirical dynamical modelling of complex systems - Quanta

a history of Oxford college gardens - OxfordToday

use verbs to encourage, not nouns to praise - AlysonSchafer [via Visible]

a survey of the best UK (and UK-expat) cycling blogs - CyclingEmbassyUK

Svetlana Alexievich and the history of the western Soviet Union - NYROB

how stuff takes over our lives - Guardian

why Ged is first among wizards, Earthsea first among fantasy worlds - Guardian

grammar schools don't help social mobility - Guardian

there is no evidence for birth-order effects on personality - PNAS

(and there's only a tiny effect on IQ + intellect)

UN Human Rights Council: West Bank settlements violate Geneva Convention - Guardian

central banks should try to prick housing bubbles - AFR

the UK is replacing roundabouts with traffic lights; the US the opposite - Guardian

Le Guin on being asked to blurb an anthology with no women in it - Bookavore [via Juz]

Gödel, von Neumann and P=?NP - early thoughts on computational complexity - eCommons

the CCCP Cook Book: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine - Guardian

does the NSA have partial Diffie-Helman rainbow tables? - FreedomTinker

four tips from neuroscience for becoming happier - BusinessInsider

having power makes one feel entitled - ScienceDaily

the white Australian with the black sprinters at the 1968 Mexico Olympics - TrueActivist

Dennis Richie, C and Unix - ZDnet [via @phaseit]

Andrew Platonov: quotes and an introduction - RussianLife - Asymptote

Korean Literature: reading the Dalkey Archive Press's library - NYer

the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless - Vox

an updated avian tree of life - SciNews

academic historians on Star Wars history - Swarthmore [via Cosma]

why the electricity price can go negative in Texas - Slate

another Nobel prize for literature winner no one has heard of, yay! - Guardian

is the United States a terrorist organisation? - Intercept

visiting a Finnish kindergarten - Atlantic

I don't ever want to live in a country where preschoolers have to do lockdown drills - WP

relational aggression can appear in children as young as three - WSJ

mechanical cog wheels found in the legs of an insect - Phys

does Google have an algorithm for happiness? - CNN

the declining resilience of university students - PsychologyToday

why small children in Japan are so independent - CityLab

how Arabic is influencing French - Economist [via Bookshelf]