This time next week, stuff like this will be from the bench again 
Happy invoicing!
- Body Hacking: My Magnetic Implant - "Let’s talk about magnet implants. I don’t really bring it up much, but I have a small rare earth magnet implanted in the pinkie finger on my right hand. I’ve had it for around three years now." Dann Berg talks about his magnetic finger
- Visual Hallucinations and Form Constants - "Whether or not you know about or care to use the [Cartesian and polar] mathematical coordinate systems, it seems that our eyes and brains already make use of them when seeing and hallucinating." Interesting examination of how mathematics can lead to an understanding of visual processing. There's Mathematica code for generating the example figures for you to download and play with, and if you're interested there's some follow-up discussions linked to on the home page of the blog.
- Think Hiring a Ruby Developer is Hard? Try Staffing a Nuclear Reactor Startup - "Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, both nuclear engineering PhD students at MIT, started working on Transatomic Power, a nuclear reactor design startup, back in 2010, and incorporated it last year. The company’s product is called the Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) which they claim is not only safer than traditional nuclear reactors, but generates power using the radioactive waste of existing nuclear plants." Sounds like a more interesting thing to do after graduating than teaching or recruitment consultancy.
- Cat Odyssey: Indiana State Prison, Michigan City, Indiana: A Better Place for Everyone - "Indiana State Prison is a men’s maximum security prison. Before coming here, I had mentioned my impending visit in various conversations. Concerned cat lovers had fretted over the fate of cats confined with such a rough crowd. 70% of the offenders incarcerated at Indiana State Prison are there for murder." Diana Partington on a remarkable prison programme which allows inmates to keep cats.
- How to Write Like a Scientist - "I didn’t know whether to take my Ph.D. adviser’s remark as a compliment. 'You don’t write like a scientist,' he said, handing me back the progress report for a grant that I had written for him. In my dream world, tears would have come to his eyes, and he would have squealed, 'You write like a poet!' In reality, though, he just frowned. He had meant it as a criticism. I don’t write like a scientist, and apparently that’s bad." Adam Ruben wonders why scientific writing requires the abandonment of creative and interesting language.
- Pentametron - This algorithm crawls Twitter looking for tweets that are in the form of iambic pentameters, and strings them together into sonnets: "Tomorrow is a very busy day / The softness of a pillow.. Is unmatched. / See always nothing verge the breaking down ! / I'm not the shooter, I'm the bullet BITCH!"
- Frustro: The Impossible Typeface - "Hungarian designer Martzi Hegedűs has created a single typeface, titled Frustro, on the sole premise of making it impossible. Based on the illusion of the Penrose triangle... the type appears to be facing two different directions simultaneously."
- 20 iconic tech sounds bound for extinction - "From the hum of an old car's engine to the galunk! of a fictional plumber's fireball, sounds have an amazing ability to transport us back in time. Even just a two-second pop is often enough to bring back powerful memories of people, places, and objects from the past." JR Raphael collects together samples of some of the sounds that will disappear with old technology, or "...may already be meaningless to the 20-somethings of today."
- Satellites expose 8,000 years of civilization - "Hidden in the landscape of the fertile crescent of the Middle East, scientists say, lurk overlooked networks of small settlements that hold vital clues to ancient civilizations... By combining spy-satellite photos obtained in the 1960s with modern multispectral images and digital maps of Earth's surface, the researchers have created a new method for mapping large-scale patterns of human settlement."
- Screenshots of Despair - e.g. this bleak message from Spotify:
Happy invoicing!
Comment