links

CityNerd lays out a data-driven method for deciding where high-speed rail should be built in North America and identifies 56 city pairs that justify it, based on population and distance.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas investigates the Mikkelsen Twins and the ghostwritten-audiobook passive-income course industry, even playing along with the scheme. It is a long video essay on get-rich-quick publishing grifts.

A Last Week Tonight segment on retirement plans, high fees and bad financial advice, with comedic sketches. It explains how fees eat into retirement savings and favors low-cost passive investing.

Physicist Angela Collier rants for 42 minutes about why violin plots are a poor way to show data, citing papers on violin and bean plots. It is part lecture on how to read distributions and part opinionated critique.

A Last Week Tonight segment on sponsored content in local news. John Oliver explains why local news integrity matters and how paid content disguised as news erodes it.

Linus Tech Tips gives its 2020 breakdown of how the company earns money, including ads, sponsors, merch and affiliate links. It includes a pie chart of revenue sources.

A short clip, from 2003, of Noam Chomsky going through crimes of post-WW2 US presidents. He argues that they would be indictable under the Nuremberg principles.

Linus Tech Tips explains how Windows Modern Standby causes laptops to drain battery while asleep, arguing it makes Windows laptops hard to recommend compared to MacBooks.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment covers the working conditions of US air traffic controllers and the understaffing, outdated equipment (including floppy disks) and funding structure of the FAA. It mixes comedy with policy criticism.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in April 2023 how GPT-4 and similar models may affect translators' careers. He draws on Japanese-English translation experience.

Gamers Nexus criticizes ASUS over its handling of exploding Ryzen CPUs, overvolting BIOS settings and warranty and support behavior. It re-benchmarks the chips at defaults and argues ASUS eroded customer trust.

A three-minute side-by-side comparison of scenes from Star Wars (1977) and the WWII film The Dam Busters (1955). It shows how closely the Death Star trench run mirrors the earlier film.

Physics Girl creator Dianna Cowern shares an update on her health, struggling with long COVID and ME/CFS. It includes documentary footage and links for supporting her recovery.

James Corbett's five-minute conspiracy-framed overview of 9/11 claims.