Links

A few of my favorite things:

Cartoons/Comics

  • Dresden Codek: a webcomic written and illustrated by Aaron Diaz. Described by Diaz as a “celebration of science, death and human folly”, each comic generally focuses on a concept or theory from modern and postmodern philosophy, psychology, or science (particularly quantum physics).
  • Homestar Runner:  a Flash animated Internet cartoon. It mixes surreal humor with references to 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s pop culture, notably video games, classic television, and popular music.
  • Penny Arcade: a webcomic focused on video games and gaming culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik.
  • Piled Higher and Deeper: (also known as PhD Comics) is a newspaper and web comic strip written and drawn by Jorge Cham that follows the lives of several grad students dealing with the difficulties of scientific research, the perils of procrastination, the complex student–supervisor relationship and the endless search for free food.
  • xkcd: Stick-figure strip featuring humour about technology, science, mathematics and relationships, by Randall Munroe.

Fact Checking

  • FactCheck.org: a nonpartisan, nonprofit website that describes itself as a “‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” Contains rebuttals to what it considers inaccurate, misleading, or false claims by politicians. FactCheck has also targeted misleading claims from various partisan groups.
  • Snopes.com: the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a web site that is the best-known resource for validating and debunking urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other such stories of uncertain or questionable origin in American popular culture.

Humor

  • I Can Has Cheezburger? (ICHC for short) is the name of a weblog featuring “lolcat”s and other animal images.
    • I Has a Hotdog, which follows the same themes as ICHC but predominantly features dogs
    • Roflrazzi, making fun of celebrities in general and showing pictures of funny things in show business
    • Totally Looks Like, which matches celebrities and famous people with humorous animals, other people, cartoons, and others
    • Pundit Kitchen, which pokes fun at news, politics, and politicians.
    • Graph Jam featuring humorous office graphs such as line graphs, Venn diagrams, bar graphs and pie chart
    • FAIL Blog, containing pictures and videos of blatant stupidity or incompetence with captions involving the terms “Fail” and “Epic Fail” prominently. “Win” has also been used a few times on the site, sometimes in instances where the word “fail” is incorporated with said stupidity.
    • Engrish Funny, supplying pictures of humorous foreign translation errors
    • Once Upon a Win, featuring nostalgic success of products, people, TV shows and movies. The post subject is supplemented by informational text and videos showing its use, parodies, advertisements, etc.
  • The Onion: a Peabody Award-winning American “fake news” organization. It features satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news as well as an entertainment newspaper and website known as The A.V. Club

Free Open Source Software (FOSS)

Open Source Statistics and Data Mining.

Open Source Analysis Tools

  • gretl:  an open-source statistical package, mainly for econometrics. The name is an acronym for Gnu Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library. It has a graphical user interface and can be used together with X-12-ARIMA, TRAMO/SEATS, and R.
  • MySQL: an open source relational database management system (RDBMS). The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.
  • RapidMiner: the world-wide leading open-source data mining solution due to the combination of its leading-edge technologies and its functional range. Applications of RapidMiner cover a wide range of real-world data mining tasks.
  • The R Project for Statistical Computing: R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories . R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.
  • Ubuntu: a computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. It is distributed as free software. Ubuntu’s goals include providing an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease-of-installation.
  • WinBUGS: a statistical software for Bayesian analysis using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. It is based on the BUGS (Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling) project started in 1989. It runs under Microsoft Windows, though it can also be run on Linux using Wine.

Knowledge Sharing

  • Academic Earth:  Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars.
  • arXiv.org: Open access to 546,633 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
  • TED: Ideas worth spreading: TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration.
  • PhilPapers: Philosophy Online: An index of current online research in philosophy. Also contains bibliographies, discussion forums, and advanced research tools for philosophers.
  • PhilSci Archive: an electronic archive for preprints in the philosophy of science. It is offered as a free service to the philosophy of science community. The goal of the Archive is to promote communication in the field by the rapid dissemination of new work.
  • Public Library of Science: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.

Politics