Links from Winter 2022
Bartosz Ciechanowski, a blogger who explains technologies using explorable web toys. His latest is about GPS, but check out lights and shadows and naval architecture.
Ten minutes of fascinating deep-sea animals. You know you shouldn’t stare into the abyss for too long, but I guess 10 minutes is fine.
How to enrich uranium (with pictures)
Sofia Crespo’s Neural Zoo. And an AI-generated dictionary.
People have done genome-wide association studies about pretty much everything, but sometimes participants skip survey questions or say “I don’t know”, so there is missing data. Researchers didn’t get knocked down, instead they looked for the genetic determinants of skipping survey questions.
Cool evolutionary biology: Mizuuchi et al, Evolutionary transition from a single RNA replicator to a multiple replicator network.
The redshifting of light due to cosmic expansion creates metaphorical forests in outer space.
Which countries subsidize fossil fuels. Try to make predictions before clicking.
Artificial intelligence predicts the toxicity of drugs ahead of clinical trials. Turns out that, if you put it upside-down, it’s pretty good at generating new chemical weapons.
Wholesale wikipedias
Sentences out-of-context
“Even if tadpoles are created in a ‘Picasso’ configuration with eyes, jaws, and other organs in the wrong locations, they will produce largely normal frog faces. Those organs will move, through unnatural paths, to implement a correct frog face, even before metamorphosis is initiated.” (here)
“This amounted to a total loss of 824,097,690 IQ points, disproportionately endured by those born between 1951 and 1980.” (here)
“Seven reasonably peaceful years later, Conchobar is told of the death of Christ and becomes so angry that the brain bursts from his head, and he dies. The blood from the wound baptises him as a Christian, and his soul goes to heaven.” (here)
“Here, I introduce a novel hypothesis, the ‘private parts for private property' hypothesis, which posits that enlarged penises evolved to prevent the theft of property during sex.” (here)
Music
Rahsaan Rolland Kirk double-saxophoning in Montreux,1972, including great circular breathing
Henri Dutilleux, Tout un monde lointain…
Lomond Campbell’s Harmonograph Synthesizer
Drew McDewall, Agalma
Oniichan CD. I don’t know what this is.
Also a short update on the random clock: I am still using it after almost a year. Eventually I just accepted that I couldn’t compensate for the random time, now I just act as if it were the true time, without thinking about it. I’m pretty happy about it.