I published 72 posts in 2015, with the first on January 1 and the last on November 18, for an average of 1.6 posts/week on that interval, up 70% from 2014's 0.9 posts/week. These 72 posts accounted for about 47% of the 152 posts published through December 2015.

According to Google Analytics (which ignores my pageviews), I saw an average of 57 views per day, with non-homepage views-per-day up 97% from the last half of 2014 (before which I don't have GA records). September 18 (when 2015's overall most-viewed post was published) was the single-day high, with more than a thousand more views than any other day in Faults history. GA thinks that 41% of all sessions originated from Facebook.

tl;dr I am writing posts and people are reading my blog. I'm pretty happy with these numbers.

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The ten My Faults My Own posts published in 2015 with the most total pageviews were: (in ascending order)

• A Liberal Critique -- in which I attempt to explain why calling out harmful discourse is especially important when the people I'm calling out are on the left.
• October 28 Links: Thinkers, Statesmen, Economists, Doctors -- The only linkwrap to make the list; no, I'm not sure why, either.
• Putting money where my mouth is and Okay, you can stop it now., in that order. -- A two-part rant in frustration with the entirely ugh-y renaming of my school.
• Yes, you should hire college-educated computer scientists -- contra David Gelernter, who looks to hire only "people who taught themselves to code in high school and still can't get enough of it."
• Something About Bernie -- In

Now that we're back and I'm finally caught up on my blog-feed reading from 2015, I figured I'd link to selected posts from some of the blogs I really enjoyed getting caught up on. This is not all of the posts from all of the blogs, just some selected ones from selected ones, chosen more or less following my whims.

My reading from December 1 to December 31 totalled almost 600 posts from 23 blogs; December in Review: Part I and December in Review: Part II include about ninety links with commentary from me. If that sounds like too much for you, December in Review: Best Of is twenty links (plus two bonus mathy ones). Finally, My Faults My Own | Reading Feed already has stuff from the first bit of January, albeit in more abbreviated form.

No warranty, especially not merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, should be implied -- my interests in reading range significantly farther than my interests in writing, so don't expect that every blog is 100% recommended to every Faults reader. Nevertheless, if you enjoy reading Faults, there's probably something here for you.

As always, there's a lot more stuff that I enjoyed reading this month on Reading Feed. Do check it out!

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Leah Libresco is the single person who I believe has the best practical ideas about how to be a human being in this world.

(This video -- of her speaking about her new book -- isn't embeddable, but if you click, it will open in a new tab.)

It is something of an issue for me that certain significant bits of her deeply-considered epistemic beliefs disagree with my much-less-deeply-considered epistemic beliefs. When I put it that way, it sounds like there's an obvious, easy fix, and when you dereference what it is that I'm talking about, calling it "an obvious, easy fix" sounds...odd.

This was the beginning of a much longer post, but I realized that I have absolutely zero idea where that post is going, so instead: Here, have a great video by a math nerd explaining her experience converting to Catholicism. Even if you disagree with her metaphysical propositions, I think her approach to grappling with ideas larger than yourself is an incredibly lucid and useful framing-of-things. Maybe, hopefully, someday, I'll find the clarity to write about how I feel about the metaphysics, but in the mean time, do watch the video—it's excellent.

Elsewhere, she's been on fire all over the Internet this whole week:

• First Things | How to Strengthen Catholic Community
• Unequally Yoked | How Do You Lance a Festering Resentment?
• Fare Forward | Both/And Philanthropy (and Unequally Yoked | The People I Don't Learn to Love)

And again, even the parts which are ostensibly written for Catholics are thought-provoking reads for the

...and we're back! Staring at a critical mass of cool things in my feed today, I decided to dust off this old format, and serve seven things that I think are worth reading, even if I don't have time to write more than a paragraph or so about each.

First, a reminder that my own Reading Feed is still going strong, being the place that I leave links in the top quartile or so of the things I'd read that day. It updates every day or too, so check back whenever you've got time to kill...or see the nifty widget on the upper-right of the Faults homepage for the most recent of them.

The most recent (as of Sept. 18) links, to provide a taste, are to Dylan Matthews on the anti-vax movement and anti-autism bigotry, Bruce Schneier on "The War on the Unexpected", and Alex Tabarrok on how increasing the severity of sentences fails to provide significant deterents to crime (in a way other interventions don't).

First out of the gate: My good friend Mike Yu has an excellent piece on Medium titled "What i really learned this summer":

Whenever somebody asks me what I learned this summer, I usually say, "Probably more than I have the rest of my life combined," which is true. It turns out that what I really got out of my summer was a whole new way of thinking about the world, something that’s applicable to everything from trading to business to product to politics. The premise of this framework is:

Assuming that everybody else is stupid is usually wrong, and always arrogant.

(...)

Coming

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Ecuador, attempting to prove that it's indistinguishable from Costa Rica, tricks a tour group thinking they've gone to Costa Rica into believing that they were going to Costa Rica when in fact, they were taken to a part of Ecuador that was, apparently, indistinguishable from Costa Rica.

I'm really not kidding:

As Ecuador residents arrived, not in Costa Rica but another Ecuador airport, Tena, where they were given fake stamps in their passports as they went through a staged passport control. No attention to detail was spared as huge posters were placed over the welcome billboards at the airport. Adverts depicting Imperial beer and 'Esencial Costa Rica,' Costa Rica's national brand, were displayed in the airport to throw the group off the scent.

Even fictitious immigration documents and car licence plates were created to make the group think they were in Golfito, a port town in Costa Rica. On top of all that organisers used mobile phone and GPS blockers to keep passengers from using technology to discover the hoax. (...)

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In more serious airline news, the Congressional Research Service, a policy-analysis agency within the Library of Congress, released a 20-page report titled Terrorist Databases and the No Fly List: Procedural Due Process and Hurdles to Litigation. Footnote 41 (of 201!) reads:

Prior to 9/11, aviation security was handled by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA ordered air carriers not to board certain individuals who were deemed a threat to aviation safety. On 9/11, this "no fly" list contained 12 names.

Somehow, I guess I assumed that there were more than twelve people on the no-fly before 2001. But then again, in hindsight,

So, I've been pretty delinquent about these, but at least I've had the decency to keep stashing things I found worth reading at Reading Feed, with backlogs at Reading Feed (March 2015) and Reading Feed (February 2015).

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WSJ | China to Start Keeping a List of Badly Behaved Tourists sounded pretty scary -- until I read the article and realized that the measures are directed at Chinese citizens abroad, not visitors to China. And then it all sorta made sense, conditioned on China being, 'yknow, China.

Said Chinese president Xi Jinping:

Don't throw water bottles everywhere, don't destroy people's coral reefs and eat fewer instant noodles and more local seafood. (...)

On the topic of environmentalism, I'm on the record opining that pressuring the Harvard Management Corporation to divest from fossil fuels is a red herring, but that doesn't mean that digging up all of the of the known deposits of fossil fuels and burning them would be exactly as horrible as you'd expect: (all numbers Fahrenheit)

The next set of fossil fuels in line is referred to as resources, rather than reserves. The difference is that they are recoverable with today’s technology, but not at current prices. There is 3.1 degrees’ worth of warming if the oil and natural gas in this category are utilized, which would lead to a total increase in global temperatures of 7.6 degrees.

This warming does not even consider our coal resources. A middle-of-the-road estimate of the coal that qualifies as resources indicates that its use would lead

On Thursday, I wrote a post, the first in a series of "not everyone doing harm is evil", and a reader commented on Facebook with an NPR interview that I hadn't actually read, but which definitely fits right with the main thrust of my post:

You know, David, when my child has a nightmare, I don't come to her in the middle of the night and say, look, you're a moron for believing there's a monster under your bed. I acknowledge that the fear might be real, even if there's no monster under the bed. And we -- I sort of help her deal with the fear. (...)

Anyway, more at Thursday's post, and now back to your regularly-tardy linkwrap...

I'm a sucker for clean designs, and these re-imagined Harry Potter volumes are awesome:

...by Kinsco Nagy, a graphic-design student in Hungary.

Along the same vein, some nonzero percentage of my readers may be interested in the Bibliotheca project, a similarly-beautiful of the most-printed book of all time.

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But of course, books spend a lot more time being stored than being read, and sometimes, that storage ends up being really cool, too:

That's a trailer for Cold Storage, a documentary about the Harvard Depository, which warehouses the bulk of Harvard's second-largest-in-the-nation library collection. Related: UChicago's Mansueto library, where books are retrieved for your reading pleasure by robots:

Elsewhere in "things being moved by cranes", ever wonder where New York subway cars go to die?

More evocative images from Next Stop: Atlantic, by photographer Stephen Mallon. Apparently, the practice is pro-ecological and not pollutative -- the nooks and crannies of the cars (which are stripped down