- Fire. Dog. Life. Ice - Aimee Levitt felt like a change, and ended up in the Antarctic: ”There were so many things I could have done. I could have studied abroad in college. I could have tried to get a job teaching English in Japan or Korea. I could have applied to the Peace Corps or taken the diplomatic exam or even found a way to spend a few weeks backpacking through Europe. I did none of those things… Maybe I could go dogsledding, too! At the very least, if I were with dogs, I would have friends.”
- How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute - ”Large language models do better at solving problems when they show their work. Researchers are beginning to understand why.” Remember, they're still just pumping out whatever has a high probability of seeming reasonable, not exhibiting reasoning skills
- These gars are the ultimate ‘living fossils’ - ”Fish’s genomes are so static that groups whose last common ancestor lived during the time of the dinosaurs can produce fertile hybrids today.” At least they aren't evolving into crabs like everything else does
- CANCELLED: The 10 best aircraft of World War II that never saw service - ”From the safe distance of several decades it is blindingly obvious that many of the aircraft thrown into the maelstrom of combat during the Second World War were worse than useless and should never have been built … Rarer and more obscure today are the outstanding aircraft that never made it. Despite their brilliance, due to politics or bad timing or official indifference or bad luck, these potentially superb aircraft never got the chance to shine.” This lot could make for an interesting set of Airfix Special Editions
- I Baked the Worlds Fastest Chocolate Chip Cookie - HT to vetran for this one: ”I have been working on making a fresh baked cookie vending machine. In order to speed things up I build the worlds fastest chocolate chip cookie oven. Combining convection and fast pulsed microwaves I was able to get the time down to 75 seconds!”
- 100 Great Short Books - Fancy some reading for the forthcoming long weekend? Caustic Cover Critic has you covered (caustically, one presumes): ”Here's the full list of 100 great short books I recommended on Twitter, in one place for ease of reference.”
- The fish doorbell - The fish of Utrecht have a problem, and you can help! ”Every spring fish migrate upstream, in search of places to spawn. They swim through the centre of the city of Utrecht. Unfortunatly, the boat lock is closed during spring. You can help the fish. Do you see a fish? Press the Doorbell!… When there are enough fish waiting, the lock will be opened.” This has proved to be so popular that sometimes there are too many people for their own live streams (pun intended?), and you get the live YouTube feed instead. But keep going back and, if you see the doorbell and there are fish hanging around, give it a ring!
- Inside the London office where swinging pendulums keep cyber threats at bay - Ian visits one of Cloudflare's sources of entropy: ”There’s an office in London that contains something critical to the security of the global internet — a bunch of swinging pendulums. They’re not even connected to anything, but their perpetual swinging action is what keeps the internet safe(r) from hackers and protects your online transactions from fraudsters.”
- The Intel 8088 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside - Back to the 8088 (an 8086 with an 8-bit data bus) for Ken Shirriff: ”One way that the 8086 and 8088 increased performance was by prefetching: the processor fetches instructions from memory before they are needed, so the processor can execute them without waiting on the relatively slow memory. I've been reverse-engineering the 8088 from die photos and this blog post discusses what I've uncovered about the prefetch circuitry.”
- George Stibitz: Computer Art - Stibitz did some of the earliest work on digital computation in the 1930s and 1940s. In later life, he got an Amiga: ”This is what he said about it in a letter to the department chair in 1990: ‘I have turned to non-verbal uses of the computer, and have made a display of computer "art". The quotes are obligatory, for the result of my efforts is not to create important art but to show that this activity is fun, much as the creation of computers was fifty years ago.’” This one is “Two Mile Road”
Happy invoicing!
