Things on the internet

Complementary to list of things I have made.

Other stuff, created by others

I don’t follow all of the resources linked below actively, but I would if I had enough time and mental energy.

Blogroll

My blogroll list is long and has its own separate page. See here.

Great resources (general)

OurWorldInData is an amazing resource for quick and loose investigation of various politically relevant data and statistics. https://ourworldindata.org/ For example, contrary to popular myth, our increased life expectancy is not only due to decreased childhood mortality (while it helps).

Tilastokeskus (Statistics Finland, in Finnish). Päivänä jolloin tajusin että monet uutisissa ja poliittisissa keskusteluissa viitatut asiat ja väitteet voi kohtalaisen helposti tarkistaa tutkimalla niihin liittyviä tilastoja Tilastokeskuksen nettisivuilta tunsin itseni hetken typeräksi. Ei ihan yhtä kätevä kuin OurWorldInData, mutta silti avuksi ajatteluun. https://www.stat.fi/til/index.html

Valtionbudjetti.fi (in Finnish) vuorostaan samalla tapaa esittelee Suomen valtion budjetin ja sen muutosten lähihistoriaa.

StackExchange is also a great resource to get ones questions answered (and often one finds their question already asked by someone else, and also answered). Especially useful ones include https://english.stackexchange.com/, https://superuser.com/, https://math.stackexchange.com/ (for generally undergrad level) https://mathoverflow.net/ (graduate/postgraduate), https://askubuntu.com/, https://tex.stackexchange.com/.

Encyclopedia Britannica often gets a bad rap for being less cool than Wikipedia. However, the individual articles are often very good and coherent! (If you can access them, as of writing this they are not apparently paywalled.) https://www.britannica.com/ For an example, see this review of history of probability and statistics.

Great resources (inverse problems)

OneWorld IMAGINE internet seminar talks are cool. One of the good things that resulted from COVID-19 epidemic of 2020 was open internet streaming of seminars that otherwise would have remained difficult to access. https://sites.google.com/view/oneworldimagine. Busy people seldom have time for everything (and me even less because I don’t nowadays work in inverse problems, the topic of IMAGINE), but even looking at seminar titles and abstracts every now and then provides some ability to remain current. (It also is significantly cheaper and easier than trying to attend conferences.) And if there is something really interesting, all of OneWorld family of seminars seem to maintain a public YouTube channel.

Check also other OneWorld seminars, for example:

Great resources (machine learning)

I recently2021-02-11 discovered PapersWithCode.com which collects many machine learning datasets and most importantly, papers that come with the code to run their algorithms. Looks cool!

Magazines and periodicals

Quanta Magazine is of the best popular science magazines, and what’s best, it is freely available on internet. https://www.quantamagazine.org/

Aeon is a magazine / essay newsletter. It casts a quite wide net when it comes to focus (= I don’t read most of the essays) but when when I have found the title interesting, the article has been often quite good. https://aeon.co/ For example highlights, check these essays on Hannah Arendt (S.R.Hill, 2020), Nordic children’s literature characters and their authors (R.W. Orange, 2020), trolley problems (J. Wilson, 2020), Kierkegaard (Baggini, 2013), trial by ordeal (P.T.Leeson, 2017), hard problem of consciousness (A.K.Seth, 2016), personal information networks (C Thi Nguyen 2018) and the reasonable opposition to Galileo (C. Graney, 2016).

Suomen Kuvalehti (in Finnish). News maganize with history and tradition. Mikään ei ole täydellistä, mutta vakavasti otettava suomenkielinen ajankohtaislehti ja ainoa jonka olen arvioinnut hintansa väärtiksi. https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/

Tähdet ja Avaruus (in Finnish). Mitä maailmankaikkeudessa tapahtuu? https://www.avaruus.fi/uutiset.html

Forums (general and specific interests)

LessWrong I already introduced above. https://www.lesswrong.com/ A word of warning: while interesting, healthy amount of skepticism is warranted for some ideas. (I remain skeptical concerning some of the thoughtspace that can be found there as far it concerns AI risk from AGI, biohacking, and social dynamics). However, similar internet forums are rare (or at least, I don’t find them often). Some selections from LW that I have enjoyed:

Kvaak.fi. (In Finnish.) Suomen paras / paras suomenkielinen sarjakuvakeskustelufoorumi. Vaikka foorumi ei ole yhtä aktiivinen kuin menestyksen huippuvuosinaan, jo pelkästään keskusteluiden arkistojen säilyttäminen on kulttuuriteko. Painetut sarjakuvat kestävät ihmisiän, joten myös vuosi(kymmeniä) vanhat keskustelut samoista teoksista ovat edelleen aarre. Itse olen käyttänyt nimimerkkiä Mambrinon kypäri. https://www.kvaak.fi/keskustelu/

HackerNews. This link aggregator / discussion forum run by Y Combinator (startup accelerator from US) is seldom about hacking or hackers, but one the best platforms for “water cooler” discussions for all things computation, software and occasionally machine learning. https://news.ycombinator.com/

Reddit is in general is not what it used to be, but r/AskHistorians is a rare subreddit, being an excellent resource to anyone interested in history and willing to learn. On the other hand, it is run unlike most other subreddits (and not much like forum, but heavily curated). https://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians. Check also their FAQ and book list.

Recommended TTRPG material

For starters, see Lasers and Feelings by One Seven Design. It is a minimal set of rules but nevertheless fully sufficient get you started with roleplaying! Next you can also check out their other stuff, which is also cool but I am less familiar with it.

Delta Green is a living classic horror/conspiracy table-top roleplaying game that was born in the 1990s as a legendary source book for Call of Cthulu RPG. While you are at it, check out also Trail of Cthulhu and related line of products by Pelgrane Press.

(Spoiler warning: If you are ever going to play in a game GM’d by me, do not click links in this paragraph.) If you are in want of scenario ideas for running Delta Green, fan wiki known as The Fairfield project hosts a list of Delta Green Mailing List Shotgun scenario contest entries since 2005. (/end of spoilers).

For something FUN, see Everyone is John. (1d4chan has also a useful record.)

Other Things Entirely Not Serious (except when they are)

The list is not finished. Actively updated. Previous update 2021-02-11.