The Weekly Weird - 2021-01-22

Skorgu

2021-01-22 14:00

Ever wonder which of your switch ports was faster? If so, HFT is the industry for you.
Why don't men (often) wear fancy outfits? Blame the French.
Of course money buys happiness.
ipfs:// support in-browser.
RIP Bugtraq
No giant lasers (which is a big downside) but you can also measure gravitational waves with pulsars.
Just...don't call it a braindance, please.
I just assume the interface to this is this (h/t mike)

The Weekly Weird - 2021-01-15

Skorgu

2021-01-15 14:00

This is just ... rude. This is not how you treat a guest who has traveled far. Don't piss off the birds, they will have their revenge.
Most products are shaped as much by structural forces of economics and inertia as by intentional design. Cars are the most visible example of this and maybe this is why.
No matter your stance on recreational pharmecuticals, please do not inject psilocybin tea into your veins.
Be careful your glass doesn't ... rust?
Semi-related, function follows form in the pointed shape of Roman Amphorae.
Learn to process images from space probes.
If you're at a loss what to get your favorite mailing list author for the holidays, I think Matt Levine likes wine that has been to space. I, on the other hand, would like one of these lovely, useless, bespoke retro terminals. At least it's more luggable than a DECbox.
The wall climbing package picking robots are coming for... Amazon spider man's job I guess?
wat (h/t John)
Market Microstructure Miscellany: Revenge of the Darkpool.

The Weekly Weird - 2021-01-08

Skorgu

2021-01-08 14:00

Whew, what a nice vacation where nothing eventful happened in the world. I feel so relaxed.

Amuse yourself with dancing robots and read about how they got their groove.
Is this the new "but will it run Doom?"
... but will this run Doom?
GPT: Now providing hot and cold running Avocado armchairs.
Is this the dumbest or greatest camera/lens combination?
What's actually involved in restoring service to a CO when it, uh, breaks? NANOG has got you covered and there's tons more in this giant pdf.
Reverse-engineering a CPU is easy, just X-ray it and replicate the layout. And check for fake transistors (more in this pdf).
When we get more qubits to play with, look out for solving nonlinear systems.
Videogames may or may not cause violence but they can certainly kill.
Look up at the sky, my children, and gaze in rapt wonder at the ~~seven~~ six sisters.
In the universe of Bad Signs, pride of place belongs to "TYPE B FISSILE RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL". Fortunately, they took care of it.
If mRNA vaccines are more like software than biology, what can we learn from looking at the code?
How do spacecraft keep their astronauts alive? This hour-long video will tell you all about it.
Automation killing the ... dockhand industry? With vaccums.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-12-11

Skorgu

2020-12-11 14:00

Having a 'universal' flu vaccine would be pretty neat.
A fascinating look at both how the Shuttle was a @#$% disaster and how critical organizational chains of communication are: exploding stovepipes.
Well, that was absolutely one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. We got all the good bad rocket euphemisms in a single launch: a engine-rich exhaust, a RUD, and lithobraking (the nose cone survived pretty well). In fact, with sufficient crumple zones, that impact was actually comparable with F1 crashes that are routinely survivable. It's no MOOSE, though.
Of course, there's a long history of stupidly amazing rockets that haven't advanced far beyond tech demos: Sprint pushing a mere 100Gs, and this horrifying abomination for example.
Why, you might be wondering, do all rockets put the flamey bits at the bottom? Surely that makes it hard to balance! If you look online, you'll immediately learn that this is a 'fallacy' but rarely is it explained as nicely as this Wired article about Iron Man.
If you've been censoring important information by pixelating it, I have some bad news for you.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-12-04

Skorgu

2020-12-04 14:00

Well, I guess my goodbye to Aricebo was well timed. The collapse videos are amazing and heartbreaking (credit where credit is due).
France has some very strange places
Changing the battery shouldn't require pulling the transmission
See also: “Our aircraft is a first stage because it actually contributes delta V.”. Micro-strato-launch.
See also: How do you perform precise orbital injections with rockets you can't turn off?
The Internet Archive has all of James Burke's legendary Connections series available to download
As an owner of aging eyeballs, I look forward to regrowable axons
Port your code to Arm at your peril; the memory model is a bit different.
Most AI is dumb and if using the right phrasing in your documents can fool dumb AIs, you'd be a fool not to.
OpenZFS 2.0!
Why do they shut bridges down for high winds? Oh.
I try to keep current events out of this since I imagine you're all getting your fill elsewhere. But this is just too weird: The Scented Candle index.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-11-20

Skorgu

2020-11-20 14:00

RIP Aricebo. Very glad I got to see it before it went.
It's time for good news, bad news. Good news: No leap second this year! Bad news: NEGATIVE LEAP SECONDS.
A nifty cron/workflow scheduler built on Postgres: pg_timetable
The most popular curry in Japan is not named what you'd expect.
Want to build a flame deflector for your giant rocket? NASA has you covered (pdf).
From the everything-old-is-new-again department: Navy shoots down ICBM.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-11-06

Skorgu

2020-11-06 14:00

Ok, so maybe 'life on Venus' was a bit premature. But, something weird is going on with Titan so don't give up hope.
I've definitely been holding out a bit on getting a 3d printer since the resulting prints are so limited in their strength. I was not aware that the main limitation seems to have been printing at hotter temperatures.
I'm so very glad that we've moved on from inventing artisinal file formats and now everything is just a zipfile:
- Jar (and twelve different other similar formats)
- OpenOffice and OpenDocument
- Chrome Extensions
- Self-contained python executables
I guess having a satellite backbone does let you put little datacenters anywhere.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-10-23

Skorgu

2020-10-23 14:00

Good news everyone! Kessler syndrome has been delayed again.
Turns out there's a lot of 'smart home' devices that, despite using proprietary networks and backends, are just ESP8266 chips. You can flash those with whateer you want like this open firmware that supports MQTT and TLS.
Perception is hard.
On the "worth going to space to manufacture" list: Bulk Metallic Glass.
Fortunately, there's water in them there hills!
I'm shocked, shocked, that redditors failed a turing test.
Is there anywhere taking bets on whether a multinational decade-long project or a plucky startup saves the world first?
I believe that the 3310 can survive a metorite impact so this is the logical choice for building a cell network on the moon.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-09-25

Skorgu

2020-09-25 14:00

Ever have the urge to play with a few thousand memristors? No? Huh. Well, now you can anyway.
Got a tub full of shrimp on Mars? Grind 'em up and make biolith.
Sorry Eve Online, you're old news. The new horrifying implausible nonfiction thriller generator is Blockchain and it's sequel, Son of Blockchain. Bonkers.
Too serious for you? Prefer your post-modernist semi-fiction more Hunter S. Thompson and less Stephenson? Ask your doctor if Degens is right for you.
...which blends right into CSI-IRL: extracting a fingerprint from a photo.
Why do New Yawkers tawk like that? Because I'm walkin here, that's why.
Need to drive on some sand to escape the Golden Horde? Have some tips (on the sand part, I can't help with the Mongols.
Finally, a Real Operating System on Linux.
We all know how planes fly, right? The shape of the wing, Bernoulli, all that jazz? Nope.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-09-18

Skorgu

2020-09-18 14:00

The big news is the recently discovered venereal infection. To learn more about Phosphine, ask a chemist of course. Getting to Venus is going to take a bit though it just so happens that the Europeans and Japanese are swinging by anyway so maybe they can peek in the windows. Bad news: there might be a territorial dispute.
Not useful on Venus but potentially useful in the outer system: metallic glass gears.
SuSE brings Ceph to Windows.
Good news everybody! You don't need to use your MetroCard at all anymore! Oh.
"Good work 47, the blame will fall on this 'ransomware' source and no-one will be the wiser."
In other space news, you don't need to be Tom Cruise to visit the space station. You could also be a reality show winner!
"Intercepting Zoom's Encrypted Data with BPF"
Chicken chicken "Chicken.pdf"? Chicken chicken chicken "Chicken chicken chicken". Chicken chicken chicken.
A deep exploration of ~~nasal demons~~ undefined behavior.