Links for Spring 2024
A philosophy professor describes his experience with having schizophrenia for 30 years without telling anyone at the workplace.
Downloading the subtitles from 90,000 films and doing statistics on the dataset is an underrated hobby.
How people turn sand into LLMs: a visual explanation of how microchips are made. (Or you could not read this, and assume chips are made by wizards throwing lapis infernalis or whatever into big cauldrons and stirring until the mixture starts answering your questions. Keep some magic in your life.)
Strange creature of the season: the photosynthetic slug Elysia chlorotica. “It punctures the algal cell wall with its radula, then holds the algal strand firmly in its mouth and sucks out the contents as from a straw. Instead of digesting the entire cell contents […], it takes up the live chloroplasts into its own gut cells as organelles and maintains them alive and functional for many months.”
Bacteria’s genomes are full of little palindromes called REPs. It’s still not clear how exactly they got there – there are multiple theories, but it definitely involved a long, wild history of alliances and betrayals between DNA sequences.
Music: here is an obscure micro-genre called Forest Psytrance. Still less trippy than good old classic Exotica.
Wholesale wikipedias
“This article is about the geometric phenomenon. For the pornographic genre, see tentacle erotica.”