Favourite reading of 2014

While cleaning up a few old Evernote folders I came across a few partly written posts, including this one with some of my favourite articles from 2014. I know… 2014 is so last year, but the articles are still good.

• Paint the Earth - Randall Munroe (XKCD): a great example of how order-of-magnitude thinking can help with seemingly overwhelming questions. XKCD What if articles are so much fun.
• Nobody’s Son - Mark Slouka (New Yorker): My Dad died a few years ago. The author’s Dad died and he wrote this beautiful, honest, confused and touching piece.
• How to speed up your computer using Google Drive as extra RAM - Andrew Brown: So well written, and utterly hilarious.
• A field report from malaria’s cradle of drug resistance - Ed Young (Ars Technica): “Victories in malaria are often short-lived”. It’s fascinating to understand how we fight Malaria, and horrible that it still affects so many people.
• Game of Thrones - David Owen (New Yorker): Listening to an expert speak in their field is almost always an interesting experience. This guy is an expert on aircraft seat design and the article is ever so interesting.
• Diary: “Sh-t, I’ve Had A Stroke” - Geoff Dyer (London Review Of Books): Insight into what it’s like to have a stroke. Someone close to me had multiple strokes, so this helps me understand their world just a little more.
• The Internet With A Human Face - Beyond Tellerrand 2014 Conference Talk - Maciej Cegłowski: “The Internet remembers too much”. It didn’t need to be this way, but now that it is, what can we do?
• Hug Some Concrete - Bill Gates: On scarcity, efficiency and consumption. I think Bill Gates is awesome.
• Dixie Zen - Sam Anderson (Oxford American): Riding truck tyre inner-tubes down a river in Louisiana. So relaxing.
• Ejection Site: Fastest Man on Earth - John Paul Stapp: 46Gs, rocket sleds and seat belts. What a trailblazer. What courage.
• The Man With The Golden Blood - Greg White: The life of a universal donor and the mechanics of blood transfusions. So interesting.
• Zero Hour - Johanna Scutts (Lapham’s Quarterly): The development of timepieces and the wristwatch.
• Green Honey - Muyueh Lee: Graphically testing the theory that “Different languages have different ways to describe color”. This is a really clever use of data, and beautifully done. Do view this on the site, rather than using Instapaper or a reading application.