Software

• Instapaper – I’ve been using Instapaper to save longer articles to read later; it’s great when you come across something you want to read, but don’t have time to immediately read it. Beyond simply saving the link for later, it also has an iOS app that downloads the article for reading offline (e.g. while flying). The archive and “liked” lists are also handy for digging up past articles you’ve read; most of these links come from my instapaper likes.
• Kerbal Space Program – A sandbox game where you build rockets and fly them around the solar system. It’s simple enough to play without being a rocket scientist, but challenging enough to make successful flights rewarding.
• SourceTree – A great, free Git/Mercurial GUI. This has been around for a while as a Mac app, but they only recently released a Windows version.

Money

• Debt, Deficits, and Modern Monetary Theory – Bill Mitchell gives a high level explanation of MMT, a macroeconomic theory built on the foundation of fiat currency.
• A European Solution to the Eurozone’s Problem – George Soros pleads with Germany to allow Eurobonds or leave the common currency.
• The Low Inflation Trap – Paul Krugman points out that the zero lower-bound on short-term interest rate leads to a higher lower-bound on long-term interest rates.
• Scrap the Corporate Income Tax – An argument for scrapping the corporate income tax.
• The Best Way to Save Banking Is to Kill It – An argument for separating the business of taking deposits from the business of lending.

Technical

• Combinatory Logic – In contrast to lambda calculus, combinatory logic is an equivalent program representation that doesn’t have explicit parameters or substitution. Instead, combinators are used to implicitly form functions. See also Iota and Jot, which use combinators to interpret any string of binary digits as a program, a simplification of an important component of Godel’s incompleteness theorems.
• Lambda Diagrams – A combinatory logic inspired visual representation for lambda calculus expressions.
• Are scalars “just” degenerate matrices? – Some thoughts on the relationship between dimensionless scalars, units of measure, and linear algebra.
• Architecture of Open Source Application – The Glasgow Haskell Compiler – The AOSA book is good in general, but I found the GHC chapter particularly interesting.
• Digital Physics – Irrational numbers aren’t computable, but modern physics relies on them. If you assume that anything physical is computable, that implies that either our theory of computability is too narrow, or our theory of physics too “irrational”. Digital physics is a general direction of research that tries to find computable models for physics.

Politics

• The Empire Lobbies Back: How Big Cable Killed Competition in North Carolina – A report on how the cable industry made it illegal for cities in NC to provide internet service for their residents.
• Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? – What is the role of corporations in creative industries?
• Richard Nixon’s treason – While campaigning against Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon was afraid the Vietnamese peace talks would succeed, so he convinced the South Vietnamese to pull out of the talks with the promise of a better deal once he was elected president.

Society

• For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of WWII
• The Miner’s Daughter – A profile of Gina Rinehart, possibly the wealthiest woman in the world.
• Living with Less – A Lot Less – Reflects my own philosophy of trying to simplify my possessions.
• The Creator – An interview with Markus Persson about life after Minecraft made him suddenly wealthy and famous