The Weekly Weird - 2015-05-08

This double edition brought to you by the letter goldenrod and the number Rhinovirus.

• I barely follow this article but the bits I think I understand sound utterly fascinating: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-chase-moonshine-s-shadow/
• Totally awesome: http://www.seastar-project.org/
• some good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9440886
• If anyone needs me I'll be trying to figure out a way to justify buying one of these as a recruiting tool: https://throt-l.com/aircraft/gigantic-rc-jet-turbine-powered-sr-71-blackbird-showing-off-its-ultra-fast-flying-skills/
• For something named "open compute" details have been hard to find. Fortunately this is changing: http://anandtech.com/show/9138/open-compute-hardware-tried-and-tested
• Presented without comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
• Ok so the actual exploit here isn't that interesting but http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/27/implant-android-attack/
• "Contagious leukemia" https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/cell-line-infections-or-my-dog-has-no-bones/
• (I haven't read this in detail but it sounds interesting) http://www.ethos-os.org/\~solworth/petullo14ethosTypes-20140518.pdf
• From the "technical solution to social problems" department: http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/
• When you make a "rocket science" joke at the mad scientist's convention you get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_%28rocket%29 I mean...it would be 165 decibels five miles away. Most of a Saturn V first stage would fit inside the nozzle bell. What.
• Seems like a potentially useful primitive, pipe postgres changes into kafka: https://github.com/confluentinc/bottledwater-pg
• Now that Elon (we're totally on a first-name basis, that whole restraining order is just a joke) is done introducing his new economy of scale\^W\^W\^W world saving technology it's time to figure out if it's actually any better than regular old batteries (hint: LCA is life cycle assessment) : http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/05/sustainability-off-grid-solar-power.html (Part 1 is very good as well)
• Ever hear of those training missions and disaster simulations and wonder how much they're just making stuff up? Turns out at least this time it's frighteningly accurate: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-military-knew-the-nepal-quake-
• was-coming-87c2535aa352
• Why I'm not a pilot: http://i.imgur.com/E26u8VM.gif
• Be your own NSA for the low, low price of [redacted] http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/bms/
• PoC||GTFO is a new infosec/hacking/cursing a lot magazine in the tradition of Phrack: http://openwall.info/wiki/people/solar/pocorgtfo . The PDFs are...more than meets the eye but I won't spoil anything.
• A fascinating article that demonstrates how much information you can get out of 'metadata', even when the subjects of your investigation are being (somewhat) careful: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/the-hezbollah-connection.html

• In 2012 there were 1,701,500 truck drivers in the US. http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/freightliner-unveils-first-autonomous-semitruck-licensed-to-drive-itself-on-highways

  • ...and I have no idea how many pick-and-pack warehouse employees there are: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/fetch-robotics-introduces-fetch-and-freight-your-warehouse-is-now-automated
  • ...and, ok yeah this is a reach because there are zero tiny, super-strong employees in the world but if there were they'd be in trouble! http://bdml.stanford.edu/Main/MicroTugs

• Amazon's Aurora database is pretty neat: https://engineering.opendns.com/2015/04/07/redesigning-mysql-aws-tech-talk-on-the-aurora-database/

• Computer vision is getting good alarmingly fast: https://twitter.com/MS_Ignite/status/595365048547180545 (there's a clip of it in motion at about the one-hour mark in http://video.ch9.ms/ch9/ddc8/b373e7b1-6045-4234-9a33-e8cefde8ddc8/KEY02.mp4 )