Kickoff For February 12, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I’ve found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.
Just to let you know that the next edition of the Monday Kickoff will be in your hands on 26 February.
With that out of the way, let’s get this Monday started with these links:
The invisible dangers of travelling through time, wherein we explore the physics of journeying into the past and learn about ideas around how temporal paradoxes might be avoided.
What If Money Expired?, wherein we learn about the fiscal ideas of Silvio Gesell, who advocated that we make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange.
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft, wherein software developer James Somers offers a personal history of the work he does and how it’s changing (and may even become irrelevant) thanks to large language models like ChatGPT.
Heartlands: Kanda-Sudacho, wherein Rebecca Saunders takes us on a tour of a village near a bustling part of Tokyo where the traditional truly meets the modern.
The Cassette-Tape Revolution, wherein Jon Michaud takes us through the joys and the power that the compact audio cassette brought to consumers, and why the music industry freaked about those little plastic squares.
The billionaire problem, wherein Geoff Mulgan examines why the extraordinarily rich are significantly to blame for the state of the world.
Here’s the Proof There’s No Government Alien Conspiracy Around Roswell, wherein we get a capsule history of UFO conspiracy theories and a few reasons why whatever crashed at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s probably wasn’t alien in origin.
How mathematics built the modern world, wherein we learn how innovations in measurement and calculation led to many of the concepts and technologies that we’ve come to rely upon since the Industrial Revolution.
The Truth About Lying, wherein we learn about why learning to tell tall tales is a part of a child’s development, and how parents can help make telling the truth (rather than immediately shifting to deception) a child’s preferred behaviour.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in 14 days for another set of links to start off your week.