Links Jan 20, 2016
Profile of a top professional ballerina. It dives into the economics of being a professional dancer. Average retirement is 34.
The CIA has made a bunch of maps “unclassified” and put them on Flickr. I love maps.
Where a journalist goes to prison and discovers the joys of Dungeon & Dragons
A lot of famous people died in 2016, right? Actually no. Less than you should expect given the number of famous people and their current age. It just happened that the famous people that died were particularly famous. This analysis is excellent. By looking at the number of languages famous people’s Wikipedia pages are published in they found a proxy for “how famous” someone is. Then they looked at deaths of famous people over time. It turns out that there are just more famous people now — and a lot more OLD famous people then there were in the past. And it’s just going to get worse every year (on average)
The benefits (and costs) of raising a kid bilingual
A short history on Sabermetrics in baseball and how it started back in the 1970s
A football coach who NEVER punts — and wins…
Five books that will help you better understand conservatives
An advisor to Eastern European Governments dives into Putin’s strategy — and why the “next” world war is different from the last one, why it has already started, and why we are losing
Given that we have drones operating now, it’s a little funny that Star Wars spaceships still need human pilots. That’s because Star Wars is really World War II technology in space. Rogue One took this to the extreme with the climax involving single copies of data that had to be handed off hand to hand. Here is what is going on.
A BBC profile on a musical prodigy. Eleven years old and she has written (word and music) an opera that was performed in London. Worth watching the videos
34% of Americans believe that humans have always existed in our current form. Here is how it cuts by religious background. Jews come out looking good.
A micro-history of the first novel to be written on a word processor
“Statistically Significant” is a terrible terrible “term” that has taken over business by people who have no idea what they are talking about. But it’s a problem in academia, psychology and medical trials too. If you have ever talked about something being significant or not you need to read this.
