Monday Links from the End of the Long March of 2020 vol. DLXXIV

[BrilloPad]

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine; that's brilliant!

DEfinetly! Passed onto my undergraduate biochemist child who loves coding. He finds year1 too easy for him so this should help keep him busy.

[Paddy]

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine; that's brilliant!

[NickFitz]

It may feel like Sunday, or Tuesday, or possibly some liminal day for which no name has ever been coined, but I checked and it really is Monday

• The Full(est Possible) Story of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Press Conference - ”Rather than the Four Seasons hotel, the press conference would be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping — on State Road, in an industrial patch of Northeast Philadelphia, near an interstate and a few doors down from the Fantasy Island Adult Book Store and across the street from a crematorium. If you hit the Pentecostal church, you’ve gone too far… It’s hard to know what counts as a ****up when you work for Donald Trump.” Olivia Nuzzi digs deep in an attempt to discover just how the Trump presidency’s end came to begin in such an unlikely location.
  
  
• Christmas: The mail order pioneer who started a billion-pound industry - HT to BR14 who took the time to send me this one on Christmas Day lunchtime: ”[The] mail order shopping industry, now worth billions, which was inspired by a little known 19th Century Welsh draper who lived ‘in the middle of nowhere’ and left school at 12. Pryce Jones could only dream of the impact his entrepreneurial vision would have on the world when he was selling Welsh flannel to Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale in the late 1800s.”
  
  
• Study tracks elephant tusks from 16th century shipwreck - ”In 1533, the Bom Jesus – a Portuguese trading vessel carrying 40 tons of cargo including gold, silver, copper and more than 100 elephant tusks – sank off the coast of Africa near present-day Namibia. The wreck was found in 2008, and scientists say they now have determined the source of much of the ivory recovered from the ship.” The analysis even revealed which tusks are from elephants related to known elephant families - and just how many other such families are now lost
  
  
• The Mystery of Mistletoe’s Missing Genes - Turns out mistletoe shouldn’t work: ”The cells of all multicellular organisms rely on the organelles called mitochondria to make their biochemical fuel — all multicellular organisms except mistletoes, that is. Not only do their mitochondria produce little if any of this fuel, they’ve lost many of the genes needed to make it. In the few years since botanists discovered this anomaly, scientists worldwide have tried with no more than limited success to figure out how mistletoes pull off this trick.”
  
  
• How One Photographer Captures the Glory of Birds in Flight - Remarkable photos: ”It is many frames, compressed to a single moment. Catalan photographer Xavi Bou is fascinated with birds and the challenge of making their flight patterns visible. He has combined his passions for nature, art, and technology to create these images which he calls ‘ornitography,’ from the Greek ornitho- (‘bird’) and graphe (‘drawing’).” There’s more about the project on Xavi's own site.
  
  
  
  
  
• How severed arm regurgitated by tiger shark led to murder mystery - ”When a tiger shark vomited up a tattooed arm at an aquarium, it set police on a hunt through Sydney’s crime underworld to find a murderer.” A strange tale from 1930s Sydney
  
  
• Time-Travel Rephotography - HT to OwlHoot for this interesting project: ”Many historical people are captured only in old, faded, black and white photos, that have been distorted by the limitations of early cameras and the passage of time. This paper simulates traveling back in time with a modern camera to rephotograph famous subjects. Unlike conventional image restoration filters which apply independent operations like denoising, colorization, and superresolution, we leverage the StyleGAN2 framework to project old photos into the space of modern high-resolution photos, achieving all of these effects in a unified framework.”
  
  
• Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine - Bert Hubert explains the vaccine in terms a software developer can understand: ”The vaccine is a liquid that gets injected in your arm. How can we talk about source code?… DNA is like the flash drive storage of biology. DNA is very durable, internally redundant and very reliable. But much like computers do not execute code directly from a flash drive, before something happens, code gets copied to a faster, more versatile yet far more fragile system. For computers, this is RAM, for biology it is RNA. The resemblance is striking.”
  
  
• Game UI Database - If you’re looking for inspiration for that game you’re writing, this project by Edd Coates allows you to browse and filter a huge amount of extant game user interfaces: ”340 Games and 12274 Screenshots: The ultimate reference tool for interface designers.”
  
  
• The Wormworld Saga: Chapter 10 - It’s here! As Daniel Lieske has to make a living, it’s been a while since Chapter 9 was published, but now you can see how the saga continues (You can support him on Patreon if you want him to produce future chapters sooner: https://wormworldsaga.com/patreoninfo.php)
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!