Spiral

http://xkcd.com/spiral/

Why the Euro will ultimately fail

http://www.maximise.dk/why-the-euro-will-ultimately-fail/

This disaster was entirely avoidable if the Euro bureaucrats had bothered to read Robert Mundall and Marcus Flemming’s seminal paper from 1962 which stated that according to well established macro economic models it was impossible to have domestic fiscal autonomy, fixed exchange rates, and free capital flows: no more than two of those objectives could be met. They won the nobel prize in economics for this in 1992, so it’s not exactly an obscure crackpot theory.

Since the euro is, by definition, the currency used in the eurozone the exchange rates must be fixed. One euro in Greece is the same as one euro in Germany. The same goes for free capital flows, if you have one euro in Spain and can’t spend it in Germany the eurozone doesn’t make much sense. So if it has to work the Euro zone members must give up their fiscal autonomy. What does this mean?

A Tale of Two Zippers

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4364

This is an interesting blog post about how zippers are made, and the tiny difference between automated and non automated zippers.  He has some other good stuff on the blog too.

dtrx: Intelligent archive extraction

http://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/

dtrx stands for “Do The Right Extraction.” It's a tool for Unix-like systems that takes all the hassle out of extracting archives.

This works really well for just extracting every kind of archive on Linux.  It has good options for things like creating a folder if the files inside are all at the top level (so you don't end up with 100 files in whatever folder you are working in).  Works well as a shortcut in whatever file manager you are using.

Showcase your language one vote at a time

http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/44680/showcase-your-language-one-vote-at-a-time-experimental-challenge

If you hang out on Stack Overflow at all you've probably seen this, as it's been near the top of hot questions for weeks, but I figured I'd post it as I've found it very interesting.

The way it works is people posted a language along with an interesting fact.  Then as people upvote those languages people could edit them with examples of interesting code snippets of a length equal to the upvotes.  In other words, if a language had 4 upvotes there would be 4 examples of interesting code snippets, of lengths 1, 2, 3, or 4 characters.