Some really good links

Something for everyone here, I think.

1. This is about the shape of Rome, in both geographical and historical terms. Interesting from the start. 

2. Nicely done Wikipedia from the future.

3. Transcript of Balaji Srinivasan talking about well, so many interesting things, ranging from the Treaty of Westphalia to why should keep your expense low to cryptocurrencies to India. 

4. Why has nuclear power been a flop? 

5. Consciousness. I have to confess that this may take some re-reading.

6. Not aliens, drones. Full of fun thoughts: e.g. the fact that people are so embarrassed to say that they've seen a UFO means that you should disguise your drones as UFOs and then Americans won't report them to their bosses. (Also has a link to video of the secret US place where they experimented with recovered MiGs, if you like that sort of thing.)

7. What Wes Anderson is all about. If you are not a fan then this won't make you a convert, but I have warm feelings towards The Royal Tenenbaums, at least, and this captured much of what I liked in that. 

8. So, you remember Guns, Germs and Steel? Turns out it's wrong: you can domesticate zebras. And ride them very easily (video).

9. If you like stories about craziness in US education then here's another one.

10. Burn it all down! As Roger Scruton said. Or, rather, he said this: "I sometimes think that the greatest service to our culture was done by the person who set fire to the library at Alexandria, thereby ensuring that nothing survived of that mass of literature, other than those works considered so precious that each educated person would have a copy of his own. The communists had performed a similar service to intellectual life in Czechoslovakia, by preventing the publication of anything save those works deemed so precious that people were prepared to produce them in laborious samizdat editions. These would be passed from hand to hand and read with eager interest by people for whom knowledge, rather than career advancement, was the goal."

UPDATE - BONUS LINK 11. Of course Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's Dad.