Happy vernal equinox!
Happy invoicing!
- India’s Urban Leopards - ”One day last May, Prakash Bhoir was preparing for his son’s wedding when an unexpected guest appeared before him and his neighbors. But instead of running for their lives, they bowed to him in reverence. The leopard gave them a direct glance before vanishing into the jungle. Later, they would conclude, the leopard had come to bless the newlyweds.” Puts my concerns the other day about a cat potentially hassling the blackbirds in the hedge outside into perspective
- The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models - ”Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors.” Interesting thoughts on the possible problems of emergent behaviour in systems too big to understand.
- Dizzy apes provide clues on human need for mind altering experiences - ”Great apes deliberately spin themselves in order make themselves dizzy, academics at the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham have discovered.” I didn't realise they had that many apes in Warwick and Birmingham, spinning or otherwise
- I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan - Is sustainable energy use possible in the heart of the city? ”On May 22, 2022, I began an experiment. I unplugged everything in my apartment, with the goal of drawing zero power from the electric grid for one month. I had no idea how I would make it past a few days… As I type these words in January, I’m in my eighth month. My Con-Ed bills continue to show zero kilowatt-hours.”
- The college wrestlers who took on a grizzly bear - The headline sounds like they went looking for one, but it was the other way round: ”Up on the mountain, Brady and Kendell had waded into a deep brush, so dense that it was almost impossible to see the ground. Kendell was about 50 feet away when he heard Brady yell, ‘Hey, watch out for this big pile of bear s---.’ That's when they heard a loud cracking noise. Brady ended his sentence and was only able to blurt out ‘Bear!’ before a 500-pound grizzly hit him in the chest.”
- Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic - ”How Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.” A look back at Alan Cooper’s great invention.
- The end of the A601(M) - ”One of the UK’s strangest little motorways, the A601(M) in Lancashire, has just been downgraded into oblivion.” Sic transit gloria mundi
- Diaries of Note – On this day in diary entries - Shaun Usher, creator of Letters of Note, Speeches of Note and Lists of Note is back with a new project: ”Every day, beginning on 1st January 2023, a new (old) diary entry will be published on Diaries of Note, with each entry appearing on the same day and month as it was originally written. Every single diarist will be different—nobody will appear twice—which means that by 31st December 2023 you will have been transported back in time by 365 people… Countless hours have been spent obtaining permission to use the diary entries you will read on Diaries of Note—or at least, those that are still in copyright.”
- Reverse-engineering the multiplication algorithm in the Intel 8086 processor - Ken Shirriff continues his exploration of the 8086: ”One of the nice features of the Intel 8086 processor (1978) was that it provided machine instructions for multiplication… Even so, multiplication was a slow operation, about 24 to 30 times slower than addition. In this blog post, I explain the multiplication process inside the 8086, analyze the microcode that it used, and discuss the hardware circuitry that helped it out.” And after the Intel guys had gone to all that trouble, ingrates like me barely used the instructions. It was quicker to, for example, multiply by 80 (to calculate the offset of the start of a row on the CGA adapter’s bitmap) by shifting and adding: assuming y was in AX, then ASL AX, 4; MOV DX, AX; ASL AX, 2; ADD AX, DX was about ten times faster than MUL AX, 80
- Bonkers Reasons For Divorce That Made US Headlines Between 1910 And 1920 - ”This photo collection shows historic newspaper clippings that feature weird and, sometimes, funny reasons for divorce in the US that made local headlines in the early part of the 20th century.” This one is from the Harrisburg Telegraph, Pennsylvania, December 3, 1924.
Happy invoicing!
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