Mike Stay
I’m copying this here because I think it’s one of the best explanations of the gun debate I’ve ever read, but Zalewski took down the article. I think I’ve found a couple of the youtube videos he linked to, but the copy of the site I found didn’t copy the links, so I’m just guessing. […]
TypeScript is unsound in part because of a desire to avoid forcing programmers to write a cast with no runtime effect just to satisfy the type checker. This code comes from their documentation on the unsoundness: However, TypeScript now supports a restricted notion of dependent type, so the motivating example is no longer a problem: […]
It is a melancholy object-oriented language to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the JavaScript programs crowded with method calls begging for more succinct syntax. I think it is agreed by all parties, that whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making […]
They have six legs! They bark!
When I was a senior in high school, I had calculus right after lunch. The room was also on the west side of the building, so the combination of dense math, a full belly, and the warm sun often conspired to make me fall asleep. One day woke up and didn’t understand a term my […]
Supercomputer simulations show effect of hadron light-by-light scattering is far too small to account for the 3.7σ deviation from Standard Model predictions. There’s still hope for new physics at accessible energies!
Story time! Around twenty years ago, I was working as a reverse-engineer and cryptanalyst for AccessData while getting my Physics degree at BYU. It was the late 90s and early 2000s. The US government had been gradually easing off export restrictions on software containing cryptography, but most software still contained pretty worthless password protection. We’d […]
They extracted stem cells, used electrophoresis to open up pores in the cells, CRISPR to turn off the DNA switch that stops the production of fetal red blood cells (which are always made correctly), turned the stem cells into marrow cells, killed the bone marrow in the patient (!), and repopulated the bones with the […]
Rose Design did some really lovely work for the design of the 75th anniversary of D-Day exhibit at Bletchley Park. The D itself was made from ticker tape; they used the ITA2 Boudot-Murray teletype standard to type the words “Interception Intelligence Invasion” (interspersed with NULs to make it more aesthetically pleasing): I had hoped they’d encrypted […]
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/15/scientists-discover-new-pain-sensing-organ
Mexican alligator lizard
http://www.geologyin.com/2019/07/ringing-rocks-geological-and-musical.html A more plausible theory is that the elastic stresses remained in the rock when the boulder fields formed, and the slow weathering rate keeps the stresses from dissipating. A possible source of the stresses would likely be the loading stresses from the time when the rock crystallized. The diabase sill formed at roughly…
Ambopteryx:
EEG on people staring at flashing lights can pick up difference between different frequencies. TMS can create phosphenes. These guys hooked them together and played Tetris. https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-to-brain-mind-connection-lets-three-people-share-thoughts
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/791296/Spiders-electric-field-hundreds-of-miles-earth-Bristol-University-ballooning-silk
https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1119/1.5095372
Followed closely by the armadillo girdled lizard:
In the last year, enormous progress has been made in generating coherent text. https://minimaxir.com/apps/gpt2-small/ A model less than a tenth the size of the 1.5B GPT2 model that the researchers are refusing to release. Dreamlike, choppy, somewhat incoherent, but an order of magnitude better than what we had last year. https://grover.allenai.org/ – type in a headline, […]
Using a combination of statistical, machine learning, and simulation tools, the researchers combed through data relating to 20,000 past hospital patients who had developed sepsis within six hours of admission. In particular, they looked for clusters of symptoms and patterns of organ dysfunction, then correlated them against biomarkers and mortality. The findings revealed not one […]
Popular account: “And if Pluto has such materials, it stands to reason that other outer solar system bodies also have them, including not only the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but possibly other large Kuiper Belt objects, even farther out from the sun than Pluto.” https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/pluto-has-an-insulated-underground-ocean Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature20148
Second Sight Medical releases early feasibility data on Orion cortical implant
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566 Edit: Aaand now it’s been withdrawn.
This is the larval form of the Leptocephalus Bali Seraya: More strange fish larvae.
All insects have two pairs of wings, sprouting from the second and third segment of the thorax. Even insects that appear to have only one pair, like flies and beetles, really have two: in flies, the second pair of wings diminished to new structures called halteres, while in beetles, the first pair became the elytra. […]
‘Til is a corruption of till under the assumption that it is a shortening of until, but till is, in fact, an older word than until. Both till and until mean the same thing. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/until-till-til/
Here’s some context for the recent black hole image.
I was curious what caused the oscillations in rocket exhaust. I learned they’re called “shock diamonds”, among other names, and are due to the lateral pressure of the exhaust being mismatched with the atmospheric pressure. At low altitudes / high pressure, the exhaust is immediately pinched and then bounces off itself as the pressure increases, […]
Lumii uses multilayer Moire patterns to simulate lightfields. You print out the layers on a regular transparency from an inkjet printer! https://www.lumiidisplay.com [Edit 2024: the video’s gone and the URL redirects to Fathom Optics, but the paper’s still available here.]
(Found on Reddit)
Seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact set up enormous standing waves in a large inland sea in North Dakota. The waves hit the mouth of an incoming river, which focused the waves into a 30 foot wall of water that knocked down trees and put fish next to triceratops and hadrosaurs in the fossil bed. […]
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/34
The whitepaper for my company’s new cryptocurrency project is out!
In 2015, Andreas Rossberg of the V8 team proposed making JavaScript a little saner by making classes, objects, and functions unalterable after their construction so that a sound type system becomes possible. A year later, his team reported on their progress and said that there’s basically no way to do that without breaking compatibility with everything […]
The Basilosaurus is not, as its name suggests, a lizard, but a prehistoric cetacean, a mammal. It grew up to 60 feet long (18 m). It could bite with a force of 3,600 pounds per square inch (25,000 kPa), chewing and then swallowing its food.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-mathematical-community