Ozy Brennan has some advice on writing irrational characters, which is an interesting position to take. This might not be interesting to everyone, but since I have trouble with writing things like "conflict", I found it an interesting read.
How much of the Internet—and specifically, the Internet economy—is fake? A surprising amount, it turns out, which has some concerning implications for a lot of conventional web business models.
Thought on sudden death, and what it means to see your childhood friends start dying. This turned out to be unexpectedly relatable: in the time since I saved this story, I learned that two of my elementary school classmates died of various causes.
Related: three perspectives for understanding global child mortality statistics.
Self-driving taxis will soon be sorta-not really available in Phoenix, Arizona.
Bill Gates's 2018 Year In Review. Discusses technology for education, medical research, and clean energy.
Scott Alexander asks what happened to 90s environmentalism. Through a series of case studies, the answer appears to be a combination of policy victories, alarmist predictions, and public apathy.
Speaking of the environment: during the government shutdown, the Libertarian Party organized volunteers to maintain trash disposal the the national parks. This is a slightly better media stunt than usual, and might fit in with a more effective electoral strategy.
Find out where your Congressional representatives fall on Internet/4th Amendment issues.
OurWorldInData discusses the demographic evidence that India's population growth is starting to decline. Projections indicate that the subcontinent's population will peak around 2060 at 1.7 billion, after which it may fall or level off—so we'll be waiting awhile to see if these models are correct.
The national college completion rate reached a whopping 57% in 2017; that is, slightly over half of students enrolling in any given year can be expected to earn a degree within six years. A lot of that comes from people going back to school during the Recession, but probably just racking up debt without improving their job prospects: new research suggests that the "skills gap" was an employer response to a glutted hiring market rather than a genuine problem.
On that note: SpaceX is laying off about ten percent of its workforce. It's unclear whether this is strictly a financial decision, a shift towards business operations model, or a combination of the two.
One of the Hubble Space Telescope's primary cameras experienced an anomaly earlier this month and was out of operation for a couple of weeks, but has since returned to normal status.
Starting in 2021, NASA will be conducting new experiments to grow food plants on the International Space Station. If this works out, it'll be an important step on the road to space colonization.
OSIRIS-REx enters orbit around Bennu, setting a new record for the smallest body orbited by a space probe and the closest approaches (without landing) to a celestial body.
Ever wonder why mercury is a liquid at room temperature? Turns out, we didn't have the answer until 2013, when scientists were finally able to confirm the long-standing hypothesis that relativistic effects in the electron cloud explain the element's low melting-point. The main challenge was performing so many quantum mechanical calculations, which modern computing finally allows.
