Hm, the first two links here have been lying around for five years; guess I ought to shove them out.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry on restructuring the banks

“Zomia”, a large region in Asia that was effectively stateless until recently

James Leroy Wilson on The Limits of Utilitarianism. The payoff is near the bottom.

In the film and TV series Limitless, a drug makes the protagonist temporarily super-intelligent.

In the episodes I’ve seen, it’s not established whether any skills learned with the drug remain when it wears off. I imagine that you’d want to try to develop ways to improve your unenhanced intelligence; in other words, to teach your alter-ego to learn better.

Later: In the third episode he behaves so stupidly that I lost interest.

In a period of 41 seconds on December 21, this site got hits purportedly following links from 75 different pages on scholarsandrogues.com, 21 on russia-insider.com, 21 on www.africaresource.com, 21 on irwinvillagetourzjamaica.com, 20 on jaykeating.com, 18 on *.ox.ac.uk, 17 on www.zylstra.org, 16 on www.nobleprog.de, 13 on ciaplescounreds.me.pn, and 10 pages on 5 other sites.

And then in 33 seconds on December 26: 57 pages on blog.tcmpage.com, 21 on worldpeace.org, 20 on faoumonso.strefa.pl, 14 on hudepajuw.inmart.asia, 13 on www.greendirectory.com, 11 on amary.site90.com, 9 on piratebox.site, 8 on www.strangehistory.net, 8 on masini.00author.com, 7 on lints.atwebpages.com, and 63 pages on 38 other sites.

No site appears in both of these clusters. Some are obvious spammers; some are genuine blogs; fourteen are small Picasa galleries, with no outgoing links.

The requests came from 99 different addresses; again none are in both clusters.

Later: When I finished examining my referral log for December, I decided it’s no longer worthwhile, particularly since Google usually doesn’t tell me what the search string was.