Dailies - Observations (Page 4)

Fun With GANs

Researchers at Google applied GANs to crude sketches of imaginary creatures and managed to render them in rich detail. From their post [https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/11/using-gans-to-create-fantastical.html]on the Google AI Blog: > Today, we present Chimera Painter, a trained machine

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Why Static Typing Matters

After having worked with a 20-30k LOC Python project a few years ago I became a big believer in the power of static typing. Lawrence Kesteloot articulated why static typing matters really well in his article [https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/static-typing.html]

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The Dream Machine

The Dream Machine [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/014200135X] is part biography of early computing pioneer J. C. R. Licklider, and part history of the computing revolution that started in the 1960's that eventually led to the internet, the personal

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Norris Numbers

Lawrence Kesteltoot on Norris Numbers [https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/norris-numbers.html]: > My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a

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Peat Slippage

Bumped into this remarkable video of a recent peat bog landslide in Ireland: > Peat slippage near Meenbog Wind Farm, south of Ballybofey in Donegal. #Meenbog [https://twitter.com/hashtag/Meenbog?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] 🌲 pic.twitter.com/YEQSLMfqQ7 [https://t.

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The Dispilio Tablet

In 1992 there was a remarkable archaeological finding in Greece: writing on a wooden tablet that turned out to be 7000 years old. From Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet]: > The Dispilio tablet is a wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings, unearthed

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Online Museums

One silver lining I hope we see from the pandemic is more museums creating virtual experiences. Google Arts & Culture already has a good collection of virtual exhibits from museums around the world. Here's one I've been enjoying recently: The

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Close-Up Photographer Of The Year

Winners from this year's competition can be found here [https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/11/winners-close-up-photographer-year/617070/] . Lots of great ones, but the one of the ant is truly stunning.

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The Dzhanibekov Effect

The Dzhanibekov effect is a bizarre phenomenon where objects move in ways that seem to defy laws of inertia. Science blogger Veritasium has a great video about it, although I have to say it still baffles my intuition:

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Recycling Supercomputers

How the Titan supercomputer was recycled [https://insidehpc.com/2020/02/how-the-titan-supercomputer-was-recycled/]. The video of the decommissioning: While Titan was the 12th most powerful supercomputer in the world at the time of decommissioning, but running it was cost-prohibitive: > [...] the price tag for providing

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New Species Discovered In Australia

Australian scientists have found two new species [https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-s-biodiversity-just-got-a-lot-richer-two-new-mammals-discovered-20201106-p56c77.html] of marsupial on the island recently, although they do look a lot like each other. The northern species of greater glider (top left), central species (bottom left) and

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How Swiss Direct Democracy Works

Martin Sustrik has a 3-part series [https://250bpm.com/blog:161/] that helps understand how the Swiss direct democracy system works. My takeaways: * The system depends a lot on decentralization. A lot of power is in the hands of municipalities and cantons (equivalent to

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Food From Thin Air

This headline from an article [https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/protein-from-air?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1] in BigThink grabbed my attention. The article doesn't dive into how the food is actually made, but this interview with the founder fills in the gaps: The idea seems

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Inside Bell Labs

There have been many accounts about what it was like to work at Bell Labs, here's [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1657810] another short one by speech-processing researcher Man Mohan Sondhi. Two notable quotes, emphasis mine: > The department

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Chip Shop Menus

On [https://vittles.substack.com/p/the-hyper-regional-chippy-traditions-c8d]the diversity of chip shop menu's throughout the UK. Notable quote: > The story of the deep-fried Mars bar began in 1992, in a small town near Aberdeen called Stonehaven, with one teenager daring another

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Weighing The Earth

The Schiehallion experiment was an elegant physics experiment done in the 18th century to calculate the density of the Earth. The basic idea is to stand with a pendulum near a mountain of known dimensions and composition. Due to the gravitational attraction of the

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How Decaffeination Works

The history of decaffeination and how it works today from [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180917-how-do-you-decaffeinate-coffee]the BBC.

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The Inside Of A Submarine

If you're as interested in submarines as I am you might enjoy these photos [https://ru-submarine.livejournal.com/17486.html] of the interiors and exteriors of a Soviet Typhoon-class submarine. Also recommend the book Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet [https://www.amazon.

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Milling Grain

Food historian Rachel Ludan has a really interesting article [https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-daily-grind/]on how tedious milling grain (especially maize) used to be, particularly for women. To me this again goes to show how laborious life was in the past, and how thankful

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What Happened To Easter Island?

By Aurbina - Own work [https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133096], Public DomainI'd always been curious about the origins of the giant statues of Easter Island. Why, and how were they made? Then I found that Jared Diamond had

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Origins Of APIs

A good piece [https://increment.com/apis/land-before-modern-apis/] on the origins of modern web APIs by Darius Kazemi.

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Barber-Surgeons

> Physicians who were university trained during the Renaissance considered surgery beneath them. They relegated operations—which consisted mainly of bloodletting and amputations—to the barbers; although they were merely apprenticeship trained, they had the sharpest knives. Paré was among this guild of barber-

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The Pythagorean Siphon

Here's a clever bit of hydraulic engineering in home appliances:

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Long Lived Institutions

The Long Now foundation on the longest living institutions [https://blog.longnow.org/02020/10/21/the-data-of-long-lived-institutions/]. Here's an interesting bit on the bristlecone pine, a tree with an incredibly long lifespan: > The bristlecone exemplifies how an existential crisis gives you

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Observer Selection Effects

The observer selection effect or anthropic bias is an interesting subtype of survivorship bias. From the LessWrong wiki [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Observation_selection_effect]: > An observation selection effect exists when some property of a thing is correlated with the observer existing

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