Nifty Links: Leaded Gas Driving Crime, Coffee, Mosquitos, Uncertainty and Far More

Computing

SMBC: Videogames and Opportunity Cost
SMBC: Economics. There's a short story along these lines from a while back by Phillip Jose Farmer, I think. The poor are required to consume gratuitous amounts of stuff, the weathly get to live in modest conditions as they see fit.
SMBC: The meaning of it all in lava lamps

Ars: "Profits over your dead body"
Crime rates correlate with the use of leaded gasoline.
- Linked Blog post. "A good rule of thumb – I believe – for epidemics economic, biological or social is this: If it spreads along lines of communication its entropic information. If it travels along major transportation routes its microbial. If it spreads out like a fan, its an arthropod. If its everywhere, all at once, its a molecule."

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. "an informal fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern."
TED: Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us. Fear is a form a storytelling and how we read those stories determines the choices we make. Some people -- entrepeneurs -- have productive paranoia and study their fears closely to prepare for the future.
"The Truth Is Out There…Isn’t It?". "The authors hypothesize that people who are more numerate and scientifically literate are better at gathering information that confirms their existing beliefs. Kahan believes this happens, in part, for a pretty basic reason: we just want to fit in with our friends. So we work to maintain viewpoints that fall in line with our social group." aka Being better educated, numerate and scientifically literate leads to bandwagonism and confirmation bias.

Crema Crema is a big part of what makes an expresso an expresso and it apparently is a bit complicated.
Reddit comment on Quality expresso machines

Undergrad to doctoral math and physics in a pdf. "These are step-by-verifiable-step notes designed to take students with a year of calculus based physics who are about to enroll in ordinary differential equations all the way to doctoral foundations in either mathematics and physics without mystery. Abstract algebra, topology (local and global) folds into a useful, intuitive toolset for ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations, be they linear or nonlinear. The algebraist, the topologist, the theoretical physicist, the applied mathematician and experimental physicist are artificial distinctions at the core. There is unity."
- Related Reddit discussion

TED: Hadyn Parry: Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease. "In a single year, there are 200-300 million cases of malaria and 50-100 million cases of dengue fever worldwide. So: Why haven’t we found a way to effectively kill mosquitos yet? Hadyn Parry presents a fascinating solution: genetically engineering male mosquitos to make them sterile, and releasing the insects into the wild, to cut down on disease-carrying species."