Pocket reading list : Week 2.2 of March

Minorities exploited by Warren Buffett’s mobile-home empire : Predatory lending is something I've heard a lot about but never really understood. This article shines some light on what I understand about the topic. Poor and illiterate people are deceived and are taken advantage of by this mobile housing industry, making them pay extra to buy the house by adding bogus fees and making them sign agreements they don't fully understand.


The Missing 11th of the Month : There is popular XKCD comic that shows how frequently a date was referred to in English language books published after the year 2000. Weirdly, in the comic, the 11th of the month shows up less frequently than any other day of the month. This article talks about what the reason behind this weird outcome is and how it's a result of the process used to estimate the frequency of various dates found in literature.

Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II : During the second world war, publishes in the US apparently decided to take a calculated risk and sell books at near-zero-cost to the military, in hopes of increase readership and in hopes of retaining the readership of these soldiers when they eventually return to the US.

The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators : A lot goes on behind the scenes to keep our buses and trains running, the water in the taps and the electricity in our grid flowing. This is such an account of an experiment the London Underground public transport undertook to study how the efficiency of the underground can be increased by something as simple as making people stand on the escalators instead of walking.

A Century of Silence : This is a very heavy article on the Armenian genocide, something that the Turkish government denies still today. This is an account of the steps that one city, it's mayor and it's people are taking to welcome the people that it drove away and had killed years ago. Humans have done a lot of terrible things in the name of Racial purity and this is such an account.

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