Originally posted by ladymuck
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Monday Links from the Lockdown vol. DLXXXII
Late today; I've been a bit busy
- The Beach Bum Who Beat Wall Street and Made Millions on GameStop - Fun with daytrading: ”Mike McCaskill spent years scouring the stock market and betting on long shots. Then he found the opportunity that changed his life—and helped spark the mother of all short squeezes.”
- How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars - ”Tucked under the belly of the Perseverance rover that will be landing on Mars in just a few days is a little helicopter called Ingenuity. Its body is the size of a box of tissues, slung underneath a pair of 1.2m carbon fiber rotors on top of four spindly legs. It weighs just 1.8kg… If everything goes according to plan, Ingenuity will become the first aircraft to fly on Mars.” Interview with Tim Canham, Mars Helicopter Operations Lead at JPL.
- Artificial Neural Nets Finally Yield Clues to How Brains Learn - ”The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.” Won't be long before we have robots that can go upstairs then forget what they went there for
- GPS Only Exists Because Of Two People: Albert Einstein And Gladys West - ”The science underlying [GPS] was primarily developed by two people: Albert Einstein, whose theories of special and general relativity both play an important role, and Gladys West, a still-living and largely unheralded Black woman whose scientific contributions enabled us to understand geodesy and the shape of the Earth well enough to make GPS technology possible.” Ethan Siegel on the incredibly complex task of working out where you are.
- Iceberger - ”Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.” Those pictures of a little bit poking out and a load more going deep into the water are generally wrong; this tool lets you draw an iceberg - tall and thin, short and wide, knobbly, whatever - and watch it settle and rotate into the position it would actually float in
- The Richest Black Girl in America - The fascinating story of Sarah Rector: ”When an 11-year-old Black girl in Jim Crow America discovers a seemingly worthless plot of land she has inherited is worth millions, everything in her life changes — and the walls begin to close in.”
- Trump Hotel Employees Reveal What It Was Really Like Catering to the Right Wing Elite - ”Four years' worth of stories about VIP visits and grooming protocols, palm-greasing, rotten vegetables, and that time they lost Steve Mnuchin’s coat.” Unsurprisingly, it's often the wannabes that are the worst-behaved.
- Million-year-old mammoth genomes shatter record for oldest ancient DNA - ”The million-year-old genome is here. Mammoth teeth preserved in eastern Siberian permafrost have produced the oldest ancient DNA on record… Genomic DNA extracted from a trio of tooth specimens excavated in the 1970s has identified a new kind of mammoth that gave rise to a later North American species.” The more mammoths, the merrier
- Egypt unearths 'world's oldest' mass-production brewery - ”A high-production brewery believed to be more than 5,000 years old has been uncovered by a team of archaeologists at a funerary site in southern Egypt… The brewery likely dates back to the era of King Narmer.”
- Robert Sprachman - Sculptures and photography; this cedar shingle Trompe-l'œil is called "Inside Out"
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