Hide your hyper-links, or, dealing with depth-first syndrome

This post is published externally at https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/hide-those-hyper-links-to-boost-your-readership-6f19c2bddff2 .

Like so many of us, I suffer from a neurological disorder known as depth-first syndrome. The symptoms include an inability to complete tasks, and frequent episodes of transient global amnesia. Those of us with this affliction have an instinctual attraction to hyper-links. The symptoms are brought on by the presence of blue text, or underlining, or even any slight typographical abnormality indicative of the presence of a link. Sufferers of DFS describe the experience as similar to itching: the link is an irritant, and the itch only gets steadily worse, until the sufferer finally gives in to the primitive desire to scratch, the unreasonable desire to … click.

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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