Link Dump

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Here’s some links to be thankful for:

  • Legal Systems in Genre and Why No One Paid Attention to Them… Until Now – Max Gladstone on the surprising similarity between lawyers and wizards:

    …we have two professions known for conservative dark-colored wardrobes, maintaining immense libraries of impenetrable tomes bound in red leather, communicating in technical jargon drawn from languages a thousand years dead, being utterly beholden to the mysterious immortal beings they serve, and getting very little sleep. Seems like a natural fit to me.

    …Let’s consider common trappings of hermetic and summoning magic. Magic forces things to act in ways they don’t normally. So does law—we don’t need to go so far as Hobbes to recognize that in the absence of laws people would not behave in the same way as they do with laws.

    It works better than I’d think, and there might even be some historical basis…

  • My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me – Dude gets curious about his daughter’s school workload:

    Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school.

    I wonder: What is the exact nature of the work that is turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many mornings?

    I decide to do my daughter’s homework for one typical week.

    Man, I really hate homework.

  • 10 Paragraphs About Lists You Need In Your Life Right Now – As lists go, this one seems a bit arbitrary.
  • Facebook Drives Massive New Surge Of Traffic To Publishers – Amazing what a small tweak to an algorithm can do:

    The increase comes as Facebook is competing with Twitter to be seen, and used, as a vital news source, and appears to be the result of changes to how news links perform in the News Feed. In short, Facebook appears to have broadly shifted its algorithms and to create formidable new traffic streams that simply weren’t there just weeks earlier

    In August, Facebook announced changes to its News Feed algorithm, noting that, “Now organic stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top of News Feed if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments.”

And that’s all for now…

1 thought on “Link Dump”

  1. The last bit of the 10 paragraphs about lists article struck a chord. I have a long email from a good friend that’s been sitting in my inbox for a couple months now, and we’ve talked since then and I’ve said “I will totally get back to you!” but it’s much easier to take care of little things, check twitter, or whatever.

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