Reading This Time Is Different has taught me a lot about economic history, but it's taken a while because it's written very much like a dry academic paper than most nonfiction. Good news: it also has pretty pictures.

This graph struck me as very telling of our age—while the 10-year average inflation rate is always positive, only in the last generation has it stopped dipping below 0 every so often, and all of the most recent local maxima are higher than any age before.

From the book (page 179):

Perhaps it may seem excessive to devote so much attention here to currency debasement when financial crises have long since moved on to grander and more extravagant schemes. Yet the experience of debasement illustrates many important points. Of course, it shows that inflation and default are nothing new; only the tools have changed. More important, the shift from metallic to paper currency provides an important example of the fact that technological innovation does not necessarily create entirely new kinds of financial crises but can exacerbate their effects, much as technology has constantly made warfare more deadly over the course of history.

That's one hell of an analogy. The book goes on to explain that inflation is a tool used by sovereigns to reduce the value of debt owed, but the occurrence of sovereign default hasn't changed commensurately over the course of the graph.

And in case you don't follow Three Panel Soul:

this comic by The Oatmeal has a few people I follow nodding, but I disagree that this is the way it has to be.

there's no reason the phone has to be so bad. unlike other things, it's possible to fix with effort from just one of the players.

I've been pretty far behind on feeds lately, which means catching up in binges, which means missing out on things that take some time to process and follow up on. luckily jauricchio always seems to be looking out for me.

take for example the Academia vs. Business comic from xkcd, clearly written with an academic's bias (as pointed out by Wil Shipley). I left it at that, completely skipping the tooltip, which referred to the value 0x5f375a86 as being special. luckily jauricchio caught it and looked it up: it was part of the fast computation of inverse square roots (used a lot in 3-D graphics) and was later revised to the current value, 0x5f3759df. the code, courtesy Wikipedia:

float InvSqrt (float x)
{
    float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
    int i = *(int*)&x;
    i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);
    x = *(float*)&i;
    return x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
}

I love hacks like this.

Randall Munroe answering "what does xkcd really stand for?":

I've been using that as a unique point in the space of 4-character strings to point to me, you know I've been using it as my name on every service since the 90s because I got tired of changing my name every time my interests changed.

it started out when I was 10 years old and AOL first popped up and I was on there as … I think I had first skywalker4 and then animorph7 and then I'd pick other names … and then I was eventually like, "I'm tired of having names that point to other things, that identify me with those things, I want a string that will just point uniquely to me that's not my name because you know that's kinda boring."Randall Munroe (at 44:30)

he later complains about the 6-character limit of GMail, which caused my friend ozloy to become the ozzloy we know and love today.

Randall's talk is actually pretty neat, I'd recommend finding an hour to watch it. it's funny to me how we both started consuming comics with all of Calvin & Hobbes and taught ourselves braille.
also: how much Google actually knows about you.

I get asked "what does numist mean" quite a lot, and my answer is very much the same: I was really annoyed with all of the interest-based, numerically-suffixed nicks on the internet and how impersonal they were (are), referring to existing brands in order to give the identity a meaning — a first impression before the first impression, usually: "I spend too much time indoors". I spent an entire night and day trying to come up with something, typing it out, seeing if it looked or sounded awkward or already had a meaning, until I came up with numist.

finally, something entirely unique and easily pronounceable, or so I thought. at the time it didn't occur to me that it had a close neighbours in the English language, and I intended it to be pronounced nümist but every so often someone who's never learned another romance language comes up with a dumb-sounding alternative. I later discovered it should have been capitalized as well (Milami made the same mistake), which would have utterly ruined numist for me since I really didn't like the harshly angular properties of the capital N in contrast to the curves of the rest of the nick.

I discovered these shortcomings years after I'd chosen it, making it a bit silly to change. a lot of people know me by this nick now, and it's not uncommon for it to be used as my name in meatspace by folks I originally met online.